Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 22/05/04

As promised a couple of News items ago, the EduWeb WebCam has been released and is now available. You can get it from here: http://stuhasic.com/eduweb/ewwebcamsetup.exe - or on the Downloads page at the left. Full PDF instructions included in the download. You'll need a USB Camera (webcam) installed on the PC you want to serve images from. Don't bother if you don't have one. But then again, maybe you should get one! They're only $70 or so... If you do have a camera setup, you'll have your WebCam website up and accessible in less than 3 minutes. Comments most welcome.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 20/05/04

My new website providers give me some really good statistics and breakdowns of visitors. Since February when I launched http://stuhasic.com - there has been over 5.5GB (yes, gigabytes) worth of downloads from the site, 80% of it from the EduWeb website. The average per day has been almost 60MB, including weekends. There have been over 8,000 separate visits with over 33,000 page views, an average of 340 page views each day. Visitors are overwhelmingly from Australia, but the US, Singapore, Canada the UK and New Zealand combine to about 15% of all traffic. By size, the most downloaded items are PDF documents - instructions! Since February, the main EduWeb installation program has been downloaded no less than 704 times. That's more than the whole of last year in just four months. I'm really impressed how people seem to be supporting themselves when it comes to EduWeb, because with that sort of traffic, I would expect to be inundated with requests for help. Thankfully, I'm not!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 15/05/04

Last year I bought a Web Camera and wrote that EduWeb Photo Studio tool. Anyone ever used it? Anyway, I decided to play and see what else I could do. I've written a new *easy* program which turns your Windows PC with WebCamera into a LIVE WebCam (stills) which can be run across your school, or across the whole of NSW DET. If you have broadband at home, you can use it with a camera to have your own personal WebCam site so the whole world can watch what you do! Why? In a school situation, you might use it in the PC Lab. From any PC/Mac in the school on the network, you can "watch" the Lab through a browser. You can even have multiple cameras around the school and watch them all from one PC - all accessible from your EduWeb school intranet. If you're a NSW public school, you can watch from any DET school or office. For example, one school can set it up in a classroom and tell other schools about it. They can all take a look at what's happening in your classroom! Coming very soon...

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 06/05/04

Following a successful day's training on 27/4 at Gwandalan PS, I have decided to work on the structure for an all-day hands-on EduWeb Administrator's Training Course. It would cover all aspects of administering EduWeb in a school, installing through configuring to using and managing. Participants would learn how to create EduWeb templates and distribute them, how to add new students and how to setup and use the EduWeb Photo Studio. Best practice for using the Calendars, News and Photo Galleries would also be covered as well as a serious look from the student's point of view and how to best apply EduWeb in the classroom. I haven't worked out exactly where and how it would all come together and I'll probably need DET assistance for that, but ideally it would be in a school computer lab where participants would come from surrounding schools. There would have to be a small charge to cover room hire, lunch and handouts, payable to the school. More as I think of it...

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 25/04/04

A Step-by-Step guide titled "How to Create and Distribute EduWeb Templates" has been completed (previously, only the first part of this guide was available). It is now available for download and includes everything you need to know to create and distribute EduWeb templates for use with student pages at your school. This 24 page document (1.18MB) is very simple to follow and provides an excellent starting point for teachers who would like to create (and hopefully share) their own EduWeb templates! You can get this document by clicking on the appropriate link on the EduWeb Downloads page or by clicking this link: http://stuhasic.com/eduweb/ewtemplates.pdf - it's 1.18MB in size and requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any comments you may have about the guide are most welcome.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 22/04/04

EduWeb 2004 by default contains 6 Photo Galleries. There is a new download that will allow you to increase the number of galleries from 6 to 9! - The EduWeb 9 Galleries Option is simple to install into your existing EduWeb structure and includes a new version of the Photo Galleries Utility to allow for the easy transfer of photos into all 9 galleries. If you've filled up all your EduWeb Photo Galleries and you want more, this download is just what you need! Furthermore, you will not lose any of your existing galleries - neither the photos, nor the descriptive text. Many thanks to Linda Babic for this suggestion/request.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 09/04/04

After just one Term since the release of EduWeb 2004, there's already been lots of great feedback, covering all different aspects of the new release. It's great to see people are already using the News, Links, Photo Galleries, SRC section and Calendars. It's also great to hear that students are doing wonderful things in terms of publishing their work. If you haven't gone through the EduWeb Feedback page recently, it's well worth a look. The reason EduWeb is spreading so widely is because of word of mouth. Apart from this website, there is virtually no real promotion of EduWeb by me because I already have a full time job in the Sydney Region and I can only update this site in my own time from home. But if you want to share your thoughts about EduWeb and what you're doing with it and how it's making a difference, I'm happy to put them on the EduWeb Feedback page. Enjoy.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 07/04/04

Only a day to go and there goes term 1. I have been getting so many e-mails from schools from all over the place. Some who are trying out EduWeb for the first time, some who are running it now for the 3rd year! You might be interested to know that up until today, the main EduWeb program has been downloaded 613 times. Now at best, that means 613 schools, but even if it's half that, 300 schools in one term is pretty good. In all of 2003, the program was only downloaded 680 times. In the world of letting people know about EduWeb, next term will be busy. I'm presenting all day at the SDD at Gwandalan PS where the Principal has arranged sessions and invited surrounding schools to attend. Then I have a session at the National Classroom Technology 2004 Conference in Sydney, a Computer Studies Teachers Association meeting, a couple of other sessions in St George and the ASLA conference later this year. Have a great break!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 30/03/04

The Downloads page has been redesigned to make it easier to find stuff. It has now been broken into categories of Software, Instructions, Promotional Stuff and 3rd Party Stuff. Take a look to see what I mean. As well as this, two Mini-Posters in PDF format have been added for download to assist your students with the process of Submitting News Items in EduWeb 2004. These instructions were produced and kindly provided for download by Justine Abell from Irrawang Public School in the Maitland area. Many thanks Justine! She has also provided some great feedback on how EduWeb is being used at her school for the EduWeb Feedback page (linked at the left). If anyone else feels like producing some "How Tos" that they'd like to share or has some feedback, I'd love to add them to this site.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 28/03/04

With thanks to Joy Wilkinson for pointing out the problem, the EduWeb Add New Students Utility (ewaddstudent.exe) has been updated and is now available for download from the Downloads page. The version prior to 28 March 2004 did not transfer the Student Writing Portfolio to any new student EduWeb folder structure created using the utility. The new release, called the 2004 version looks exactly the same as the previous one, except it will now transfer the Writing Portfolio as well. If you have not yet installed EduWeb, the 2004 version of this utility is included as part of the main EduWeb 2004 download. For those schools who already have EduWeb 2004 installed, you should download the new version of this utility, replacing the copy in your EduWeb folder on your server.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 24/03/04

Here is a link that may want to hold pride of place linked on your EduWeb "Educational Site of the Week" link - http://www.kidsbookshelf.com - What we want to promote here is students using the technology interactively - not just to find and absorb information, but to create information - the same concept as EduWeb. If your students have written a poem, reviewed a book or are otherwise creative, send them to this site! How proud will they be when their book review or poem is on the web for the whole world to see? Now, for the teacher's professional development. If you are looking at introducing or continuing to work with EduWeb in your school, I consider you an "Education Technology Leader". There is some excellent reading at this site which may help to develop you further into a real change-agent at your school. Take a look! http://www.techlearning.com - Very impressive.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 21/03/04

As mentioned before, a Step-by-Step guide titled "How to Create and Distribute EduWeb Templates" is currently under production. I know I said it would take a couple of weeks yesterday, but I've finished Part One of this document and made it available for download using the Downloads button at the left. It includes everything you need to know to create and distribute a basic EduWeb template for use with student pages at your school. The document is very simple to follow and provides an excellent starting point for teachers who would like to create (and hopefully share) their own EduWeb templates! More sections of the guide will be added soon detailing the more complex things you can do with templates as well as further uses of the EduWeb Topics Utility. You can also download/print the guide by clicking this link: http://stuhasic.com/eduweb/ewtemplates.pdf - Enjoy! Any comments you may have about the guide are most appreciated.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 20/03/04

The latest release of the EduWeb Topics Utility was completed today. With this version, it is possible to transfer not only single files to each student's folder, but also transfer entire folders in one go. You can also define a custom group of students to distribute files to other than just by Year or Class. This is especially useful for High Schools who can use it to create different class groups for different subjects. You can even transfer files to ALL students at your school as a custom group. The EduWeb Topics Utility v2 is now available for download on the Downloads page using the link at the left. Soon you'll also be able to download a detailed Step-by-Step guide for how to Create and Distribute EduWeb Templates at your school. I hope to have this complete within two weeks. I look forward to any comments you may have about the new EduWeb Topics Utility!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 19/03/04

Today I discovered a great little site you may want to let your students know about - http://www.zooish.com - this site contains not only images you can grab for free, but it also contains excellent information about the characters depicted in the images. You'll need to check it out to see what I mean. Some schools have already told me that they added this site to their EduWeb front page under the 'Educational Website of the Week' link! One really important thing to stress to your students though is that while flashing graphics might make their page look nicer, the most important thing is their content which they need to work on. How will an image of a hopping kanagroo benefit their learning? So while this is a great site, don't let your students go overboard with the images in their webpages - make sure their content is even better!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 24/02/04

I've just started work on version 2 of the Topics Utility program. Several people have given me suggestions for what to include, but while I'm at it, if you have any more suggestions, that would be great. Here is a screen shot of what I've put together so far: http://stuhasic.com/eduweb/ewtopics2.jpg - Here are the two main new features: 1. The ability to copy a single file OR a whole folder of files (and subfolders if you wish) into each student's EduWeb folder and; 2. You can still select to copy into a Scholastic Year (Grade), or into a class that EduWeb knows about; but as well as that, you can also now select a custom group of students to copy the selected file or folder into. Custom groups include EVERYONE in one go, or any group of students you can easily make in Excel. The nice thing is you can save and re-use groups. Should be ready in a couple of weeks and available from the Downloads page for free.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 20/02/04

Many schools are starting to look at and use the EduWeb Photo Galleries. Before you start, consider these simple rules: 1. Don't turn the camera to take a "portrait" (tall) shot, always hold the camera in landscape to take wide shots. 2. If you're taking photos for the gallery, set the camera to a lower resolution. 640 x 480 is fine. You don't need 5 MegaPixel shots to display on a computer monitor, they'll just be huge and slow everything down. 3. Think about using some of the effects on the camera. If you're taking pictures of a play that's set in the past, try setting the Sepia effect. What about Black and White photography? Might be good for the Staff Gallery - hides the wrinkles! 4. Get the students to be really discerning about their shots. Remember, each gallery will only show 10 photos, so make 'em good. 5. Update the galleries regularly. Keep the site interesting!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 19/02/04

Most High Schools use Vertical Roll Classes, where there's a few students from each grade in each Roll Class. The problem with this is that in many cases, you end up with dozens of small classes in each grade. That's no good for EduWeb. What these schools need is a utility to automatically edit the School.txt file exported from OASIS to change each student's roll class to a new one based on their surname grouping. The EWRejigger.exe utility will do exactly that for you. Put the EduWeb diskette with the School.txt file in the floppy drive, download this utility to the Desktop and run it. A few seconds later, you're ready to make your EduWeb. Your students will be placed in classes called A-D, E-I, J-N, O-S and T-Z. That way, it's easy to find a student's web page, based on their surname. It also means there's NO MANUAL manipulation of the School.txt file required. For big high schools, that's a huge bonus. Get the EWRejigger.exe program from the Downloads page at the left.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 13/02/04

Today, a delegation from a public education authority in Wales, UK came to Sydney to take a look at all this fuss going on about EduWeb. I joined the delegation on a visit to Bellevue Hill Public School in Sydney's east. Suffice to say, they were impressed (read: floored). This school has now started to use EduWeb for the third year and have literally gigabytes of students work in their Student-Centred Intranet. They have so much evidence of the real difference that publishing student work onto an intranet is making. The work and presentation can be described in one word: staggering. The digital portfolio work being done in this school is truly innovative, as are the management structures they have put in place to keep it going. In just two short years, this school has become a showcase for EduWeb, whose work will now be appreciated from the other side of the world. Congratulations to the students and staff of Bellevue Hill Public School.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 12/02/04

If you get this error when you try to submit a News Item, it means the workstation has not had the EduWeb Libraries installed and registered. This is a very simple process. Just go to the Downloads page (at left) and find the download called EWLIBFIX.EXE and download it. Save it in the EduWeb folder. Then any PC that has this error message can simply run that program from the EduWeb folder to fix it. There's also an EWLIBFIXQ.EXE file that you can download. It does exactly the same thing, but requires no input from the user, it's totally silent. Perfect for running from a logon script. Now get cracking with your News Page!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 12/02/04

Anyone started using the News and Photo Galleries in EduWeb 2004? Here's one thing that might help you get started: If you read through all of the 39-page EduWeb 2004 doco, you'll see that I think this stuff might be able to make a difference, but it needs teachers to push it along, and it needs students to contribute. One way students can contribute is by being News Reporters and Photo-Journalists for the new School Intranet! How do you get students to do this stuff? Make REAL jobs for them. I've just posted to the EduWeb site a PDF file which is a "Positions Vacant" ad for the two jobs. Take a look: http://stuhasic.com/eduweb/positionsvacant.pdf - Click it, print it and post it around your school. Get as many enthusiastic students as you can to take on the jobs and get these useful parts of your intranet firing right away. On the Downloads page, (about 4th from the top) is a link to the same file, but it also offers a link to an MS-Word format of the same file.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 10/02/04

For schools that had a 2003 EduWeb and would like to keep it, you may find there's no link by default to it. The new 2004 front page of EduWeb has a "Student Pages" button, but it points to the Year pages for 2004 only. Here's what you can do: Open the eduweb\2004 folder. Copy the file index.htm to a file called studindex.htm. Now move that file to the eduweb folder (one level up). Edit the file and remove the Year links from it. Insert two buttons from the eduweb\ewimages folder - the buttons you need are but-2003.jpg and but-2004.jpg. Link each button to the index.htm file in the appropriate folder 2003 or 2004. Then edit the index.htm in the eduweb folder and edit the hyperlinks for Student pages (both the button and the student picture). Have them point to studindex.htm. Hey presto! You can pretty up that studindex.htm page as much as you like.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 07/02/04

It appears larger numbers of schools are taking on EduWeb this year, many for the first time. I thought rather than flood this listserv and the TL one with queries and discussions about EduWeb, it would be worth creating a mailing list specifically for it. The EduWeb mailing list is aimed at any teachers wanting to use EduWeb with their students, it's not just for techos and installers. The idea is to share resources, ideas and experiences to make this change process easier across the state. If you are running EduWeb at your school this year, could you please pass this message onto your involved teachers? Details and instructions for joining the EduWeb Mailing list are at this site. Just click on the Home button at the left and in the *NEW* box at the right is the link to join the mailing list. Everything you need to know is on that page. I'm hoping the numbers will grow quickly and we can get some useful discussion going. See you on the EduWeb list!

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 07/02/04

It finally had to happen. With the restructure of DET and the dissolving of Districts, I have been informed that district websites will be eventually removed, replaced by regional websites. All of the important resources on each district website will be retained and managed centrally. For a few years now, the St George District website has hosted all those little programs and utilities I wrote in my spare time and gave away to schools. Because I was managing the St George District website, and because districts had an identity in the past, it made sense to make those programs and resources available through that website. In the new structure, I'm a regional technology adviser, no longer working by myself in a district context. It is now not appropriate for DET to centrally host all my stuff and for this reason, I have moved it all to my own private domain. The home page is http://stuhasic.com - Take a look! I hope you like it.

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 11/01/04

After some four months of after-hours development, most of it sitting in front of the TV, the long-awaited final release of EduWeb 2004 has happened! Not only is the base software for creating a student-centred AND school intranet finished, but so is an extensive amount of documentation and support materials. One major new feature is the EduWebFTP module. With this utility, schools can EASILY upload the EduWeb School News and School Calendar pages to their Internet site - removing the need for double website editing (this News page is uploaded using that tool!). This is nice. Please take the time to read through the 39-page EduWeb documentation. It's designed to be read by novices and will hopefully give you some great ideas of how you can use the various parts of EduWeb 2004 in your school. Get Stu's EduWeb 2004 from the Downloads page (link at left).

Submitted by: Stu Hasic on 17/12/03

Today, the BETA release of Stu's EduWeb 2004 was made available for schools to test over the school holidays. There were several very successful launches of Stu's EduWeb 2004 in venues across Sydney and in some regional areas, including Port Macquarie, Maitland, Lake Macquarie, Ryde, Hornsby and the main show at Oatley. All up, over 500 teachers were provided a sneak preview of what's in EduWeb 2004, before this BETA release. Several schools have volunteered to test the BETA prior to its final release in January 2004. Stay tuned!