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Download Best of Belshaw 2011

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• Best of Belshaw 2010
• Best of Belshaw 2009

I’ve got an idea for a book on The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies as well as an updated version of #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

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Recently I rediscovered the excellent free planners by Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing. You can find them here. I like breaking out the crayons, so had a ball colouring in the productivity heatmap!

Unsurprisingly, the most useful on a day-to-day basis is the daily planner which is certainly comprehensive but needed tweaking for my context. So below is my effort, for what it’s worth. I’ve only been using it for the last few days but, in conjunction with Google Calendar for weekly/monthly planning it’s been awesome.

(Embedded doc not showing? Try direct link to PDF)

If you want to want to fill it in electronically or tinker with it for your own context there’s a Microsoft Word version below:

[download id="3"]

If you like this, you may also appreciate my (free!) e-book entitled #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity.

What’s so impressive about it? Not only does it seek to encourage groups to come up with their own (informed) definition of Digital Literacy, but it provides activities to make the abstract practical.

Fortunately, my good friend Paul Lewis (@aerotwist) is a bit lot of a coding ninja. In fact, he’ll soon be packing his bags for Sweden to work for Fi, one of the foremost web design companies in the world. He took about 3.1 seconds to knock up the relevant scripts, etc.

So now, if you go to dougbelshaw.com you’ll notice that the bullet points fade in when you move the mouse. Classy.

I’ve rewritten the README file included in the zip file below to make it more understandable by mere mortals, but you’ll still need to know your way around HTML. I’ll do my best to help if you get stuck and add a comment below, but I’m making no promises!

A couple of days ago I was at an departmental ICT representatives’ meeting at school. Every problem that was flagged up seemed to me to be easily solved by an installation of Google Apps Education Edition:

• Want to be able to provide staff/pupils with more than 10MB webspace? GMail offers over 6GB!
• Want students to be able to start work at school and finish off at home? Try Google Docs!
• Want departments to be able to quickly and easily create websites? Use Google Pages or Google Sites!

That evening I started putting together a proposal. As usual, I tweeted about what I was up to.

A few kindly folks – namely Tom Barrett, Dave Stacey, Damian Bariexca, Kevin Jarrett, Miguel Guhlin, Paul Williams and Daniel Stucke were kind enough to give me feedback and suggestions.

The version I submitted to the Senior Leadership Team and those in charge of ICT at my school is available here:

Google Apps proposal

For various reasons, I doubt that it will gain any traction at my school. However, I’m putting it up here with the hope that it may prove useful to someone else in their cause!

I’m delighted to say that today, via the wonder of popurls, I came across a video showcasing a freely-downloadable piece of software called Phun that allows you to do the same! Have a look at it, a thousand words of mine wouldn’t do justice to the simplicity, elegance and intuitiveness of it:

It’s currently available for Windows and Linux with a Mac version coming soon. You can grab it as a free download here!

Please note that this script is NOT my own work! As I have stated below, I am simply making it available here in case it is taken down elsewhere. I have no idea on how to modify it. Sorry.

If you’re reading this on the blog rather than via the RSS feed, you’ll probably have already noticed the new addition in the top right-hand corner. The way in which the page ‘peels back’ to reveal a link to my educational consultancy business was inspired by a number of sites I’ve seen recently who use it for advertising. It’s remarkably easy to accomplish. Here’s how…

After a few initial searches I thought I was going to have to stump up $8 for the script. Not so. I came across this post which offered the script for free download. I’m providing it in the more compatible ZIP format below in case it becomes unavailable elsewhere.

Peel.zip

The README file explains all, but it’s a very simple process:

1. Extract the ZIP file.
2. Edit the small.jpg file to your liking.
3. Edit the large.jpg file to your liking.
4. Open peel.js in a text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit.
5. Search for, and replace http://www.dougbelshaw.com with the name of the site to which you want the advert to point.
6. Upload the peel folder to the root directory of your website.
7. Add the following between the <head> and </head> just after the <body> tag in the HTML of your homepage:

<script src="peel/peel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

You should then see something similar to what I’ve got on this site. Let me know if and when you do something similar!