Each school will be set up to use the same Joomla template, but the style, design, and branding will match the school colors and logo. By design this will help make the brand look and feel of the district consistent and user friendly to the employees and patrons within we serve in the district. It will also help streamline the support and maintenance of the site.

Training Structure
1) I had a majority of elementary schools on one day, and the secondary schools on another day in order to accommodate with the space in the computer lab at the district office.
2) Trainings were 2 hours long and were held after school because there are mix teachers, principals, and volunteers fulfilling the role of web master for that school.
3) I spent the first portion of the training demonstrating that training contents, and then the rest of the time is used for them to practice doing it, and ask questions if they don’t fully understand.

I learned a lot during the first two trainings, and mainly that “less is more” when it comes to training Joomla to a large group of people. I tried to fit too much content into the first training with the Elementary schools, and therefore caused some confusion as they tried to grasp the concepts I was teaching.

I want to be completely honest…the biggest hurdle I ran into with the first training was talking to them about Categories in Joomla. By default Joomla’s page content (Articles) is organized into Sections and Categories – there are no nested categories. This being the case, I decided to implement a great Joomla extension called K2, by JoomlaWorks, which allows for nested categories, and many many more features which I felt would be beneficial.

Week 1:

• Site planning – this went very well having the trainees write on paper the menu structure for their site.
• Menu creation. Once the students finished writing down a basic site map I showed them how to create their menu system. One of the best things I like about building the menus in Joomla is the copy feature because it allows quick building of the menu without having to build all the content first. I felt like this approach worked better for me versus (what some sources recommend) creating all the content first and then the menu. Now with the menu(s) built, the students could easily change which Item, or other content the menu pointed to and it provided instant gratification for the student. Much of the content could be copied and pasted straight over from their old site.
• K2 Categories – LESSON LEARNED: Information overload … I feel it was a mistake to introduce K2 categories at this point, because many of the trainees got confused that they needed the categories to match the menu structure. The best practice I feel at an early stage in Joomla training, would be to set up one, yes one, Master Category, and set all K2 Items to inherit those parameter settings. Then as they get familiar with the content structure and dynamic capabilities of Joomla they can start expanding and utilizing the categories in K2 to organize the site’s content.

Week 2:

• Creating K2 Items
• Using the JCE WYSIWYG editor – This component is a must-have for any Joomla site, and with the latest version of K2 there is a JCE plugin to allow hyper-linking directly to K2 Items.
• Adding images and text wrapping inside the K2 items

Week 3:

• School calendars using the JEvents – LESSON LEARNED: Not all schools are made alike…Almost all of our Elementary schools use primarily Macs, and there’s a mix of PCs and Mac usage in the Secondary schools. The first training with the Elementary schools, I mentioned the idea of using iCalX, a free service that a principal showed me to publish an iCal publicly. This seemed to me a perfect solution, that is until I had the Secondary schools and half were on the Macs and the other half on PCs. So I went to one of our IT guys and he took 2 days researching and testing different solutions to find a way to integrate the calendaring into the Exchange server. What we ended up is a dedicated calendar VM that is extended out as a public folder so users can access it via Entourage and Outlook – a great cross-platform solution. So far this solution is proving to be very efficient for the schools to maintain a school calendar. Furthermore, I have taken this idea to the District main website, and set up the District calendar and a few lunch calendars that the Nutrition department will update and therefore allow the schools to automatically pull in the calendar feed onto their own sites. Ultimately what we’ll end up with is each school will never have to update their page with the lunch menu because it will be pulled down from the District calendars.

Week 4:

• Document management – using DocMan component. Primarily I just trained them how to use DocLink to attach a downloadable document inside the K2 Item. I highly recommend using the newest version of Docman because it runs on Joomla 1.5 without requiring the Legacy mode plugin to be enabled.
• (LESSON LEARNED) However, in a few subsequent 1-on-1 trainings, I learned it makes sense for certain periodic type of content (i.e. Community Council minutes, PTA Newsletters, etc) to set up structured DocMan categories and based on those category IDs point the menu item to that specific DocMan category ID to display a chronological list of documents.

Now that the trainings are over, I am setting up 1-on-1 training sessions to help each school specifically in setting up and maintaining their school websites. Although the large group trainings were not entirely in vain, it was challenging at times to keep everyone on the same page. The main benefit from the large groups trainings, is that now when I say go to K2, or DocMan, the person knows where to go. Throughout the trainings I have been compiling a list of video tutorials on the techniques and features we are using within the Joomla installs.

Now with more dynamic websites running on the Joomla content management system, the use of RSS feeds, and social media (Twitter, etc) the schools within Canyons School District can now easily maintain and deliver up-to-date content.

The browser is clean and runs very fast, but remember this is just beta, and there are several features that are missing. Darrell Etherington over at theAppleBlog lists out the missing features, and I particularly am looking forward to have App Mode in Chrome. We’re all excited to see progress being made to get Chrome on the Mac & Linux and hope the changes and improvements come quickly.

I am a self-proclaimed-learn-it-yourself type of a person, and I strongly believe that hands on experience is a very powerful way of learning new skills. For this reason I have enjoyed the tutorials on Lynda.com because it allows me to work at my own pace, whether fast or slow, to learn new skills or dust off unused skills with a good refresher course. I would say, however, that the cost may seem high to pay $25/month, but I think it’s worth it.

I’d like to know from any of you out there if you know have used Lynda.com, your experiences, and if you recommend any other similar resources online.

Reasons I’m holding out:

1. I am not a big fan of AT&T, I think they are a crutch for the iPhone. They are more expensive and their customer service is sub-par. I say this from personal experience with them, and I hear this from a lot of my friends on AT&T.
2. I have had phenomenal customer service with Sprint, and they have even improved recently based on some complaints about their level of service. The local Sprint stores are great in this area and being a regular they have helped me a lot (for example, as of late I have had some bad battery issues on my phone. I went to the Sprint store and my contact there, Drew, hooked me up with a brand new battery free of charge)
3. In regard to a Blackberry, I prefer a touch screen, although they are nice phones.

Well, enough of why I still have my Treo 700wx…now onto my search for a good, fast Twitter App for my WM5 phone. I tried Twobile and ceTwit, but both bogged down my phone so much and would crash often. I then came across Twikini, optimized specifically for WM phones. Within 5 minutes of using is I was already tweeting and texting my fellow WM friends that they needed to download it. Amazingly Twikini is super fast, feature rich, and extremely easy to use.

So for any of you stalwart Windows Mobile users out there, I would strongly recommend giving Twikini a try.

About a month and a half ago, a friend of mine told me about Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, and that it was changing his life in so many positive ways. I got the audio book and started listening to it to and from work. Little by little I started to see great advantages to many of the concepts he coaches on. There are loads of good sites on getting started with GTD, which a simple StumbleUpon or Google search will lead you too.

Here’s how I am doing GTD:

1. Treo 700wx – I know paper is a recommended way to get started, but I have my Treo with me all the time so that made an easier transition.
2. Pocket Informant 2007 – nice for the Treo to customize categories, lists, and a whole bunch of other cool features. This isn’t a necessary piece however to run GTD using the Treo.
3. Jello.Dashboard – very cool Outlook plugin that is very easy to install. I like Jello because I see at a glance my next actions, Inbox, contexts, projects, and calendar.
4. An In Basket on my desk
5. A Review Basket on my desk
6. I am in the process of building a tickler file system, but it is not at this point a highly critical piece to my GTD system because I don’t use paper that much.

That’s it so far for my GTD experience. There are tons of other things that I could be doing, but I figure I will ease into them as I create new habits and abilities. I will say, as most other GTD’ers do, that the weekly review is painfully hard – not because of my ability, but because I get so many distractions right during the time I have scheduled. I am gradually educating my co-workers and boss that I have a standing 2 hour block on Friday afternoons wherein I don’t want any interruptions.

Here are a few of the links I have found helpful:

• Getting Started – 43Folders.com provides a simple overview and steps to begin GTD.
• GTD in Windows Mobile – JeffKirvin.net outlines using GTD on Windows Mobile – very simple and easy to understand.
• Tons of GTD references – this site on zenhabits.net is jam-packed with great links to learn about GTD. I haven’t even covered the entire gammut yet, but many of the references on this site have shed light on how to cater GTD to my way of functioning.

Well There you have it – my simple post on GTD adding to the ginormous hay stack GTD references.

Happy New Year! Let’s make it the most productive year ever!

~CoolNerd

There are so many very cool things about Mint.com, but the biggest thing for me is that I no longer have to spend 2 to 3 hours a month manually figuring out our budget. Signing up was extremely simple and having the site auto categorize my expenditures was amazing! This site is definitely in my top five cool sites!

Also Backpacker.com has it set up so you can download hike details from the website an import it into the Adventure Planner. So even if you don’t own your GPS unit you can benefit from the hiking and backpacking community on Backpacker.com to get some great details about the adventures you want to go on.

So for all you adventure hungry techies out here are some great tools to making your summer gnarly!

The whole video capture with Jing is awesome, but then the other day I started to play with the image capture piece in conjunction with Flickr – wow! I love using this feature! Now I can capture an image, edit the name, and share it on Flickr. Now with Flickr I am able to use the Flickr editing and notation features (Picknik) to indicate aspects of the image. I am using this for both bug issues as well as for doing research on the site.

One thing that is crucial for Product Managers is the ability for using communication when leading the product development. Often there are times when I try to be too diplomatic about a situation, and sometimes that is necessary depending on the circumstances and project. The most successful product managers use a the art “influencing, negotiating, relationship building and other similar similar skills” to make sure the product proves to be successful.

One thing I definitely need to focus more heavily on this year is to focus on the details more. Not sure exactly how to do it, but I am going to find out.