[Server-devel] EduBlog v0.1 Available for Comment!

[Greg Smith (gregmsmi)]

Thanks to Tarun and Marcel for putting up a page to make the idea
visible!
 
See: http://olpc.betarun.com/ui/student_sp_v2.htm
use Firefox or an XO.
 
This page has basically all the parts although the links don't all work.
Any comments, suggestions or help appreciated. I'm going to send it some
teachers for first comment by tomorrow.
 
The teacher page is close to an early draft too. Just needs to be
linked.

I want to make it fun, friendly and entertaining. I need some animated
gifs, maybe a picture of a famous Uruguayan kid hero (El Libertador? I
forget the name of the Bolivar of the south :-(. I welcome any comments
or even better HTML + Images. Think happy-go-lucky 8-year olds, laughing
and enjoying themselves. What would they want on their home page?

> GS - On full featured formatting and options vs. simple. 
TP - I thought the comments referred to the admin and teacher pages.

I misunderstood that. I think the teacher and admin pages should be full
featured and have lots of bells and whistle. It takes really good design
to make the commonly used things most visible and others less so. Aside
from that challenge more options is better. Also, try to keep the HTML
clean and documented. I hope an enterprising 6th grader will take this
HTML, modify it and post it back to make her own application in the near
future.

In that vein, I thought of one killer feature to add!

On the teacher page we should have a place for text, links and images
which the teacher can include at the top of the student page. That is,
have the teacher enter "tell us what you did this weekend" or a picture
of a frog and link to frog anatomy and text: "tell us some frog
stories". That shows up on all student pages when they go to EduBlog
home page.

I know its starting to overlap with Moodle and it's feature creep, but I
think that would make EduBlog much more useful. Let me know what you
think.

One area needing work is in scaling, particularly re: many blogs. What
if each kid has their own blog? Could the teacher UI handle that? The
current design implies two blogs. I think two types of blogs is right
but each may have many choices (e.g. 10 internet blogs and 2 school
blogs). Making it dynamic so that each student sees the right choices
for them (or all the choices) is an important step. Simple but flexible
and extensible.

I'm not too worried about the editor and formatting options on the
Student entry page. If the teachers ask for more we should be ready to
add more but it may not be top priority.

Its really coming together, thanks for the great work! We'll see how
well I can tie in the users to the development process in the next week.
You may get dozens of suggestions (and that's just from me :-) so pick
and choose what you think is right and don't let excess input slow down
your productivity.

On infrastructure front, we need to get the server shipped to its
hosting site by end of next week. I'll reply on Tony's thread to see if
we can close that.

Thanks,

Greg S