Review+Group

__**Tim (2/8/11)**__ __**NEW DESIGN PROJECT IDEA**__
 * 21st Century Skills: Facebook game/quiz: What year are you ready for?**

-2 things to research: -what skills/criteria we want to assess -software development

Once we have a better understanding of what we are trying to assess with games/quizzes, it will probably be easy to come up with material for such a product. At that point the challenge will be the software dev, but for now we should worry about those 21st century skillz and how we want to assess them.

What structure will the app take? -Quiz, or series of quizzes -Choose your own adventure

Here are some resources we talked about: Brain Age 21st Century Skills (wikipedia) [|21st Century Skills (resources on official site)] SPENT [|Samples/Tutorials on facebook.com]

__**Paul (12/1/2011)**__

In the hangout today, Paul said he wants us to get something online in the next 2 weeks. That's about 1.5 weeks of research and a few days of configuration. When we look at these review templates, let's make sure to consider the following, and see which product will get us closest:

-ability to review multiple criteria (educational value / entertainment / etc) -ability to enter objective data, like "windows/mac/flash," "closed captions for the hard of hearing (yes/no)" etc -ability to specify categories (and MULTIPLE categories, if one program covers English AND Math, or multiple grade levels) -ability for non-admin users to create a first review (not waiting for webmaster/editor to get it started) -optional, but preferred: multiple screenshots in a gallery, easy youtube connection for screen captures or user-generated tutorials, connection to twitter hashtags, possible forum associated with review site

Just for reference, here are link to some new plugins in the running:

Drupal's rating system (far from turnkey--- but looks like, with extra effort, this could be awesome): []

Kevin's recommended Wordpress plugin: []

A nice summary of multiple Wordpress plugins: []

__**-Kevin Chow **__** 11.18.2011 ** link to my Voicethread on the Macro-side of the perceived problem, as well as three potential tools for crafting (joomla, wordpress plugin, and open source PHP plugin for WP). http://voicethread.com/share/2457637/

A link to Edubuntu's "Other Educational Software Resources" page, where lots of free and open source projects made by educators and education sympathizers collaborate. [] Those of the group who are only familiar with Mac iOS and Windows could really benefit, I think, by downloading and installing a linux build such as Ubuntu or Edubuntu. At the very least, watch a video on it through youtube as it will open your mind to what's out there in terms of competition with the big two: []

Now working on learning Drupal (a CMS - content management system). I have also purchased hosting for us to experiment on once we decide which tool to use and can begin prototype building.


 * __-End Notes__**

Here's a great "Yelp Review Filtering 101" video: []

Yelp Business information __ [] __/ __ [] __

This is more of a techie thing, but here's the best "user review" web server software I could find that would work for our purposes. It runs on top of Joomla, which is a general-purpose content management system. The main missing component is the idea that users can't create NEW entries, and can just comment on existing ones: []

Here's a demo site that makes use of a lot of the underlying features: []

And this was a close runner-up. It's built on top of Magento, which is a shopping cart system. Magento seems to have a better "category" system, to help people narrow down to what they really want to see, but because it's a shopping cart, it has a lot of irrelevent stuff, too: []

Something to think about with the rating system: []