Sharing the Addiction

I have been working on creating a network of wiki to use for the various projects happening within our cluster. I have almost finished these off today and have created one wiki to rule them all which I have called the Teacher Portal and is accessed at http://teacherportal.wikispaces.com

The great thing for me about this network is that I have been able to bring together some of the tools that I have been dabbling with over the last year.

The booking wiki makes heavy use of the excellent Zoho Creator. Each school has a form embedded on their own page on the wiki that asks them to identify what they would like to work on in sessions with the facilitator and a few other details. This online form feeds into a spreadsheet that can be downloaded from the Zoho site. It is so easy to set up these forms - if anyone would like help with this, I could make an instructional video to show you how (using the great tool iShowU for Mac). I have asked that these are completed at least four days before school booking sessions. I can then download the results and clear the results off the online area ready for the next set of data to be entered. I have also asked that teachers complete an evaluation using a SurveyMonkey survey so that I can easily analyse the results.

I have also set up a series of year group wikis (see left links off teacher portal wiki) where each teacher in the cluster will have their own wiki page. With two full day year group meetings across the cluster this year, hopefully this will help build this online community.

The tools are proving to be just that - useful tools! It is great when you start to feel as if you are really finding effective uses for things after spending so many hours dabbling.

I am at last posting about this awesome little online application creator. You may have heard of Zoho as it has quite a well known set on online office applications which give Google a good run for its money. Well, I was trying to think how to set up electronic registrations for our 2008 cluster expo and I came across Zoho Creator. Basically, you can set up an embeddable form which takes the submitted information and puts it into a database that you can export to Excel at the end. The forms are a breeze to make and the program is completely free! All you really need to do is drag the type of form box (eg a single line box) from the left hand menu into the form you have created.

I wouldn’t have needed to understand anything about scripting except that I wanted the form to perform the slightly complicated task of letting a person know when the workshop option they have selected is oversubscribed so they have to choose again. Zoho Creator lets you do this but I have to admit that I couldn’t figure out how to write the scripts I needed. I put a message up on the Zoho forums and the support was absolutely amazing! Bascially, the lovely man at Zoho ended up writing all the script for me (with a few messages sent back and forwards). I just had to paste it into the right place in my application. I also made up another form that involved no scripting knowledge which allows presenters to submit their workshops.

If you want to see the finished forms, I have embedded them into the wiki I plan to use for the cluster Expo next year. Go check it out. This is a highly recommended tool and I can see myself using this over and over again.