Go to http://google.com. See how certain elements are revealed only when you move your mouse? That’s über-cool in my book. I wanted the same for the main part of my site – but have the coding skills of a rhino. 🙁
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 can remember last year seeing a prototype of an alpha of a proposal for something at a university in the US. It was showcasing live 2-dimensional ‘real’ physics simulations. It was amazing, but not available for us mere mortals to play with.
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:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5g9VS0ENM&w=425&h=355]
It’s currently available for Windows and Linux with a Mac version coming soon. You can grab it as a free download here! 🙂
