Third week of Summer
About three weeks of Nat's and the boys' summer have passed. And everyone else is getting ready to leave for 3 weeks.
At the start of the summer, Natalie and I put together some activities that we wanted the boys to try do to keep their minds working through the summer. We worked hard through the school year to get the boys writing and to get them to learn how to keep themselves from putting all their work off till the last minute. This is something that we had problems with even getting into the end of the school year. One of the stated goals I had was to give them work to do, and to have them figure out how to meet the objectives for every week.
The summer project so far has been helpful in keeping the boys doing more than just watching TV and playing video games. At the start of the project, we came to the agreement that they would try to do 7 small pieces of work and 2 large pieces of work ever week. Natalie put together a menu of work to provide some examples of what kind of activities would be small or large pieces, with a lot of flexibility around what would qualify as what. And keeping with the menu theme, we called small pieces of work Appetizers and Side Dishes, with the larger pieces of work being called Main Courses. Any rework of something done earlier counts as a new and different piece of work, normally an Appetizer.
In order to help everyone keep track of all the pieces of work, and make it easier to give feedback to the boys, I decided that we were going to keep the project as paperless as possible. Between scanners and cameras and the fact that most of what they boys would be working on was writing, there was really no reason to put things on paper.
To support this project being paperless, I decided to try to use an Alfresco install to act as a content repository and Alfresco Share to make the repository useful to an 11-year-old, an 8-year-old and a less than technology fluent teacher. And it has been working out pretty well.
I'm using the community supported version of Alfresco, but with only 4 users and a really simple use case with minimal ECM needs, Alfresco Share is more than enough. It helps that everyone has a little experience with using Microsoft SharePoint via the school district. And Share has helped significantly in bridging the distance between the Office 2007 on Natalie's laptop and OpenOffice.org installed everywhere else. Natalie is able to read what the boys have posted to the site via the small flash viewer that was already integrated with Share, and everyone is able to make comments right on the same page wher the content is displayed. The only problem we have had is the ocassional *.docx that sneaks through. While the current viewer cannot preview Office 2007 files, OpenOffice opens them with no problem after a quick download.
I'm actually impressed with how easily we have all fallen into a workflow of reviewing everyone's work. And there have been a couple of instances of rework already as the boys have taken comments and either made corrections or rewritten something someone else brought up as an issue.
We have also been able to use the workflow, wiki, link and blog that are part of the default Share and Alfresco install to reasonable effect.
The boys are not going to be able to work the site away from the home network, but I hope they will continue to keep working while traveling with Natalie over the next two weeks.
