christian website teacher

As we continue our focus on school websites during Back to School Month, today I have the privilege of introducing you to Debbie Steves, who is the newest member of the OurChurch.Com team.  Debbie joined our team 3 week ago after teaching second grade and computer class for 6 years.  During her tenure as a teacher, Debbie designed and updated a website for her class.  I thought you might appreciate some insight from her first-hand web experience, so I interviewed her about that.

Debbie shared how she started the website, the response of the parents, as well as some of the obstacles that prevented more parents from using the website.  A paraphrase of that conversation follows:

Paul Steinbrueck (PS): Hi Debbie.  How are you doing today.

Debbie Steves (DS):  Good, thanks.

PS: Remind me again, how long did you teach?

DS: 6 years

PS: Was the website you created for the school or for just your class?

DS: For my second grade class.

PS: Were you asked to do it or did you do that on your own initiative?

DS: On my own.

PS: What motivated you to do it?

DS: I liked the whole idea of having parents be able to look up what their kids forgot.  Even though they had their planners to write in, students often didn’t write down homework assignments, and didn’t get the homework done.  With the website parents who weren’t sure if their kids had homework could check the website to see.

PS: How did you get started?

DS: I taught myself HTML coding.

PS: What was on the website initially?

DS: A weekly calendar saying what homework would be due.  There was also a link to comprehension questions the kids had every week.  And I think I might have had their spelling list as well.

PS: What was the initial response?  Did it catch on right away or did it take a while?

DS: The parents who used it really liked it.  Especially for projects, which were assigned a month in advanced and often got lost.  Putting it on the website really helped them.

I had about 20 kids in my class and some of them didn’t have internet, but I would say at first about 1/6  looked at it online.  The other thing is in second grade it’s not too hard to remember what the homework is, so parents only used it when they needed it.  I didn’t create an incentive to go there.

PS: Over time you obviously added to the site and developed it further.  What kinds of other things did you add to it?

A definition list, some sight word lists, so parents could practice with their child at home, history and science study guides.  Science was usually at the end of the day, and parents would often schedule doctor or dentist appointments at the end of the end of the day, so it was the most missed class…  We might spend a week on China and a child would be gone the day I handed out the study sheet, but then the parent could get that online so the child would be ready for the test.

I also put on the site a link to the phonics curriculum, which would help them decode the rules.  I also added a link to dictionary.com so they could look up words even if they didn’t have a dictionary at home.  I also put links to some good educational sites.

PS: Over time did the number of parents using the website increase?

DS: Yes, by a few parents each year.

I also put birthdays, orientation, pictures, and other events on the website.  And my wish list.  All teachers have a wish list at the school.  Parents would often ask me what I need, and I put that on the website so they could look it up.

PS: By your last year how many parents were using the site?

DS: About ¼ to ½ of them.  A lot of parents didn’t have Internet or were families where both parents worked and didn’t have a lot of time to go online.  The number of parents calling or emailing about homework assignments went way down and the number of students missing homework assignments.

I think another reason why a lot of parents might not have used it is because the site didn’t have its own domain name and the URL was really long.  Some parents said they lost the URL or couldn’t remember it.

PS: When you were doing this did the school itself or any other teachers have a website?

DS: The school did, but no other teachers.

PS: Was that because the other teachers didn’t see the value in it or because they didn’t think they could do it.

DS: Because they couldn’t do it.  They didn’t know HTML.

PS: Do you think other teachers would have created a web page for their class if they knew about an easy web builder like NE1?

DS: It would have helped.  Now teachers are supposed to send information to the school’s web administrator who would put that on the school site.

PS: Does that work well or are their delays and other issues because of that process?

DS: A lot of teachers don’t send info because they have a lot of other things to do.  The school gives teachers a huge list of things to do and it’s hard to get all of those things done not including proving information for the website.

PS: Sounds like the principle did not make having class updates to the website a high priority compared with other things they were expected to do.

Any other advice for teachers?

DS: When I first started out it was very time consuming.  But I liked the fact that I could personalize the pages and make it fun by putting apples or pumpkins all over the page.  I don’t like to not know what I’m doing up ahead, and this was a way for me to make sure the parents weren’t in the dark either.  There’s not always time to contact parents individually and the website was a way I could at least make sure parents had information about homework and other things we were doing…  It was fun for me because of the creativity I could put into it.  And after a while it was not time consuming at all.

Do you wish your computer was faster? Engineers and physicists from Germany have demonstrated the quickest prototype yet of an advanced form of RAM tipped by hardware manufacturers to be the future of computing. The device is so fast it brushes against a fundamental speed-limit for the process.

Magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) is a faster and more energy efficient version of the RAM used in computers today, and hardware companies think it will in a few years dominate the market. Its speed and low power will in particular boost mobile computing.

Whereas conventional RAM stores a digital 1 or 0 as the level of charge in the capacitor, MRAM stores it by changing the north-south direction of a tiny magnet’s magnetic field. Each variable magnet is positioned next to one with a fixed field. Reading a stored value involves running a current through the pair to discover the direction of the variable magnet’s field.
Spin flips

The MRAM that IBM and most other manufacturers are betting on uses the spins of electrons to flip the magnetic fields, called spin-torque MRAM.

Now researchers in Germany have built a spin-torque system that is dramatically faster than any other. Santiago Serrano-Guisan and Hans Schumacher of the Physical-Technical Federal Laboratory of Germany worked with University of Bielefeld and Singulus Nano-Deposition Technologies researchers to build it from tiny pillars 165 nanometres tall.

The top end of each pillar acts as a variable magnet that stores data, whereas the bottom ends are fixed magnets. A current passing through a pillar from bottom to top has the spin of its electrons lined up by the permanent-magnet region.

When those electrons reach the pillars’ other end, they flip the variable magnet region’s field to match. The field can be flipped back by reversing the current.

Usually when the field is flipped it takes some time to settle into its new orientation. The north-south axis draws a few circles in the air before settling into place.
Wobble control

But theoretical work says it needs to draw only one circle before finding its new position, making the process faster. The German team achieved that, developing a way to observe and control the field’s wobble during and after the flip.

By adjusting the duration and strength of the electrical pulse that flips the field, only a single “wobble” is allowed to take place, matching the theoretical limit.

The result is a device many times faster than any before. “Present MRAM are programmed by pulses of about 10 nanoseconds duration,” said Serrano-Guisan. “So we are ten times faster.” The very best conventional RAM needs around 30 nanoseconds for an equivalent operation.

Robert Buhrman, an expert in nanomagnetics at Cornell University, New York, is impressed but notes that a full MRAM device has not yet been made.

The current used by the German device is at present too electrically dense to be supplied by the transistors used in MRAM circuits. “The next thing that needs to be done is to get the switching currents down to a scale that is compatible with the [standard] CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) transistor,” said Buhrman.

Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth – the capacity to move information – as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cell phones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cell phone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

Wired connections to the home – cable and telephone lines – are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments – similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.

But just as with oil, there are alternatives. Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility. A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home.

Encouraging competition is another path, though not an easy one: Most of the much-hyped competitors from earlier this decade, like businesses that would provide broadband Internet over power lines, are dead or moribund. But alternatives are important. Relying on monopoly producers for the transmission of information is a dangerous path.

After physical wires, the other major way to move information is through the airwaves, a natural resource with enormous potential. But that potential is untapped because of a false scarcity created by bad government policy.

Our current approach is a command and control system dating from the 1920s. The federal government dictates exactly what licensees of the airwaves may do with their part of the spectrum. These Soviet-style rules create waste that is worthy of Brezhnev.

Many “owners” of spectrum either hardly use the stuff or use it in highly inefficient ways. At any given moment, more than 90 percent of the nation’s airwaves are empty.

The solution is to relax the overregulation of the airwaves and allow use of the wasted spaces. Anyone, so long as he or she complies with a few basic rules to avoid interference, could try to build a better Wi-Fi and become a broadband billionaire. These wireless entrepreneurs could one day liberate us from wires, cables and rising prices.

Such technologies would not work perfectly right away, but over time clever entrepreneurs would find a way, if we gave them the chance. The Federal Communications Commission promised this kind of reform nearly a decade ago, but it continues to drag its heels.

In an information economy, the supply and price of bandwidth matters, in the way that oil prices matter: not just for gas stations, but for the whole economy.

And that’s why there is a pressing need to explore all alternative supplies of bandwidth before it is too late. Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem.

It’s coming to a age where having a website is necessary for all business owners. But who has time to update all the new products and business changes on a daily basis? The reality is the majority of business owners update their web page every 6-12 months. Usually this consists of something they think will improve the image of the website. The part that’s commonly overlooked is that updating your website pages and text at least once a month has huge benefits far beyond any benefit of a slight image change.

By updating the web page once a month it adds credibility with customers and even more credibility with the internet process (Search engines and other websites). Search engines will always list a website that is active over stale, plain, and low text (content) websites. The differance between adding even a little more text each month is huge for how search engines will consider your website in the SE ranking system.

Of course adding jiberrish will not help much, but adding good text based stories, information, and by building more pages you WILL make a huge differance. With that said here is the top 5 reasons to update your website atleast once a month:

1. Search Engines - They see changed and content rich web pages as a active website and will always rank this over a stale website.

2. Other Websites - The internet starves for new original information and by adding it to your website regularly you will have a much better chance to get free one way links to your website.

3. Customers - When customers see a website that is updated and has lots of perdinant information they are more likely to save the page to there favorites and come back!

4. Personal Investment - I’m not big on tricking myself but the more you add to your website and see actual results the more fun it will be to add more content and watch your website grow.

5. Website Quality - Eventually you will notice errors or little ways to clean up and make the website more usable when your actively updating it.

The best way to stay active is to add a blog to your website, www.wordpress.com is a search engine friendly and is super easy for anyone to use. Most web hosts like www.dwhs.net has it available for free by the push of a button. For example www.ocfocus.com You can see how the main website is the front line for the business and just adding a link on the bottom of each page to your blog you can have a easily updatability website that the search engines and your customers will love.

The other option is to have a non-static website, you can so this with blog software or any CMS (content management system) www.drupal.com is a good option for this but might require slightly higher hosting fees to run it.

Written by Charles Yarbrough for www.marketingspot.com
www.charlesyarbrough.com

1/18/2008
Forum Black List gets a needed update ( www.forumblacklist.com ) Since the launch in 2006 www.forumblacklist.com has not been updated. The project ran by President and individual webmaster Charles Yarbrough ( www.charlesyarbrough.com )
was seem to be left aside until 1/17/2008 where the size of the blacklist became over 4 times it size according to the site owner. Other new features include easier deployment
into PHPBB ( www.phpbb.com ).

The site that is kind of a eye sore ( in my opinion ) is now a great defense against forum spam and will knock about 60% of all forum spammers. The only question that comes up
is that spam is an ongoing battle, so will Charles take the initiative to seek out new open ip’s used for spamming and if so will it ever truly be enough to get rid of spam.

I for one hope so and wish the project all the luck.

Good luck,

Tech News KYW
Bob Bicknell

GodTube, whose Internet viewership has soared in the four months since its debut - it already claims to be “the largest Christian Web site on the planet” - is reaching higher.

It isn’t casting aside popular videos such as the little girl reciting Psalm 23 (more than 4.8 million views) or the rap parody “Baby Got Book” (more than 625,000 views).

But the video-sharing and social-networking site is launching some higher-tech features this month that will help churches and individuals get their messages out into the world.

Chris Wyatt, chief executive officer and co-founder of GodTube, projects that those and other efforts will boost traffic and attract 5 million to 7 million unique viewers in December.

GodTube’s new Godcaster program, already tested by a few hundred churches, allows churches to stream live video of their services, sermons and testimonials over GodTube for viewing anywhere. Then the viral software lets churches take that video from GodTube and embed it in their own Web sites, said Wyatt, whose company is based in Plano, Texas.

Using its new viral video blog, individuals and churches can easily record up to 30 minutes of video directly to Web pages on GodTube, leaving video messages much like voice-mail messages for friends or a more general audience, he said.

Those services will be free at a basic level; those who want more recording time will pay a fee.

Wyatt, 38, is about one year into a four-year program to get a master’s degree in theology at Dallas Theological Seminary.

But he’s having trouble carving out time for studies because GodTube took off so quickly after its launch in August, becoming one of the fastest-growing Web sites in the United States, according to comScore, a company that measures Internet use.

Prior to starting GodTube, Wyatt spent about 10 years as a producer on daytime shows and “reality” shows for CBS and other networks, and then designed video file-sharing systems for social-networking and other purposes.

q q q

Is there anything significant about GodTube that is being overlooked?

A lot of attention gets paid to the growth of the Web site. A quarter of a million people, approximately, have signed up to our social network, and we launched it (about two months) ago.

That’s pretty significant. Who it is, I think, is even more significant. We have about 25,000 churches that are signed up. It’s individuals and pastors.

So, really, we are acting as the infrastructure for a lot of churches right now in terms of their online video and delivering their online content.

I think that’s really important. People aren’t picking up on the fact that a good portion of the 800,000 hours of video that we have is being uploaded by churches and embedded into their church Web site or their church blog.

There’s kind of a huge church growth in that area that people really aren’t seeing. They’re more interested in the little girl in Psalm 23, but they’re not really seeing what I think is a ripple which will become a tidal wave of churches going to GodTube.

Brought to you by Page Alive Web Design

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990’s when I was working for a large Internet agency, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with a major client, during which the client asked him to register CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.

An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he’d had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn’t available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that’s who. I’ll save the company some embarrassment and won’t reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I haven’t let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL’s Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn’t realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed.

Their web design team put up a message that read:

“404 Error. You’ve obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists.”

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendatíon to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot. Persons viewing that page would be clicking the “back” button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don’t understand the “Back in 15 minutes” sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and drop them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn’t that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Bíz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I’m putting up my hand on this one. I’m not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot bíz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time, dot bíz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I’ve ever seen (and some that I hadn’t) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacatíon

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacatíon over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said “closed until after Christmas”. I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? “Why didn’t you TELL ME this could happen?”

And the dumbest web site decision I’ve ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don’t Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia, marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There’s only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don’t even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It’s tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don’t let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren’t in the hands of dummies!

To help troubleshoot firewalls and give the ability for users to protect themselves we now have a free full service proxy for public access.

www.ezwebproxy.com

If you have any questions about it, please let us know. www.dwhs.net

This is particularly useful in seeing if your ip is blocked from a firewall. By accessing the blocked web page through the proxy you can see if it’s your local ip or if the website is just not working.

Mariners Church of Irvine uses its canine ministry in social situations to break the ice and bring some people to God.

The dogs were decked out in sweaters and birthday hats. They had cold snouts, soft coats and the dispositions of Job. For more than an hour on a recent Saturday, they sat beneficently as dozens of children petted them.

They are members of the canine ministry at Irvine’s Mariners Church, which organizers say may be one of a kind.

Its mission: to put people at ease and begin a process that could lead them to God.

“They are able to break down walls that we often can’t,” said Sheree King, a Mariners outreach director.

“The dogs facilitate relationships. They start a conversation” ultimately enabling church members to make their pitch.

The program began eight years ago when Paul Bogenrief, now 60, visited the church Sunday school with Sadie III, his golden retriever. Some of the small children found the dog’s presence comforting, so he started taking her there every week.

The dog ministry expanded to other places. Today, program coordinator Janene Bankson says, it consists of eight dogs, most owned by church members.

Much of the dogs’ work involves going to monthly birthday parties for poor residents at the Costa Mesa Motor Inn.

They also help with foster kids, preside over learning programs in which children are more comfortable reading to the dogs than to adults and act as canine comfort counselors at church mountain camps.

“They show unconditional love and don’t expect anything back,” said Bankson, whose 2-year-old black Labrador retriever Reyna is a ministry dog. “They are always happy and don’t see any difference between us. They bring people in.”

That certainly seemed to be happening at the motel party where, despite multicolored balloons, face-painting, cupcakes and pizza, the dogs were the centers of attention.

Attended largely by the poor families comprising the bulk of the inn’s clientele, the parties mark the birthdays of residents who can’t celebrate on their own.

But they have another purpose as well, King said; they pave the way for a walk toward the Lord. “We try to meet the families where they are,” she said.

For Jessica Eden, a 16-year-old who has lived at the motel for two years, that meant recalling a time when she had pets of her own.

“I love them,” she said of the Mariner dogs. “The little kids need to show affection, they need to pet these dogs.”

Amanda Santiago, whose 8-year-old daughter, Michelle, couldn’t leave the dogs alone, said she too appreciated the distraction.

“A lot of us are here because of hardship and can’t afford to do lots of things.”

The visit of the dog ministers, she said, “is a good thing for the kids. It gives them a bit of normalcy that we can’t provide.”

Program organizers say it’s all a soft sell.

Though they don’t discuss Jesus unless they are asked, church members know that the dogs often make people more comfortable.

“The kids will cuddle them when they’re nervous,” King said, “and when they’re scared or sad, the dogs comfort them. Residents ask us what we’re doing, and sometimes they tell their stories.”

In the ensuing talks, she said, members of the nondenominational Christian church share their faith.

Before participating in the ministry, according to Bankson, the animals are tested for temperament, obedience and health. They also are trained to stay calm.

But are the dogs Christian?

“I don’t know,” Bankson said, “but they sure show an awful lot of love. They have some of the Christian characteristics I’d like to have.”

Bogenrief agrees. “They don’t drink, smoke, dance or dress inappropriately,” he pointed out.

“The only thing they do, if given the chance, is have sex out of wedlock.” Roy Gerber, 42, says he relishes the outings with Ziba, his 4-year-old female retriever.

“Serving with my dog is awesome,” he said.

“I love serving and I love being with my dog; this way I can enjoy the two.”

He has no doubts regarding Ziba’s religion.

“If you spell dog backward,” he said, “you get God.”

I hear that there was recently a discussion on a NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) email list about virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP addresses. They were commenting on the misconception that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRanks of those sites. There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP). Someone on the email discussion already dug out this Slashdot interview from mid-2003 with Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology. I refer to question 5, in which someone asked

Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don’t come from a unique ip address. Please don’t just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.

Craig’s reply was as follows:

I can’t just deny it? What are my other choices? Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.