Tag Archives ⇒ educational clients

Discover Thyself / Earlham College

January 7, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Discover Thyself featuring the Discern-o-Matic QuizDis­cov­er Thy­self is a “dis­cern­ment” site for Quak­er teens. Spon­sored by Earl­ham Col­lege, it fea­tures resources, videos and the all-new “Discer-o-Matic Quiz.” 

The design is all orig­i­nal. We went through six rounds of the con­cept design mock­ups made up on Adobe Fire­works. Because the site is built on Word­Press used as a CMS, Earl­ham Col­lege staff was able to add and arrange con­tent even before the design cod­ing began. The site uses the excel­lent The­mat­ic theme, a blank tem­plate that allows for quite sophis­ti­cat­ed designs using Action Hooks and com­plete CSS markup.

The most excit­ing ele­ment of the site is the “Discern-o-Matic” quiz, which takes users through a series of ques­tions. At the end the ques­tions are reor­ga­nized and pre­sent­ed to the user to help them under­stand what it is they want to do. The quiz is pow­ered using the open-source LimeSur­vey. Results are out­putted via a cus­tom PHP script that polls the LimeSur­vey data­base and out­puts in a nicely-worded and for­mat­ted Word­Press results page. The tem­plates for Lime Sur­vey were altered to mim­ick the look of the rest of the site; the aver­age user won’t notice the pass-off from Word­Press to Lime Sur­vey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, indi­vid­ual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invit­ed to share their results page via Facebook.

Vis­it Site: http://​www​.dis​cover​thy​self​.org

ReconRab​bi​.net

March 29, 2010
· Martin Kelley

ReconRabbiReconRab­bi is a social net­work for rab­bis asso­ci­at­ed with the Recon­struc­tion­ist Rab­bini­cal Col­lege. It is designed to pro­vide ongo­ing edu­ca­tion and net­work­ing for far-flung alumni.
It’s a high­ly cus­tomized, member-only site built on the Ning plat­form. The typ­i­cal Ning fea­tures are here: video, pod­casts and mem­ber pro­files. Expand­ed areas include exten­sive train­ing mate­r­i­al for mem­bers. We record­ed and I edit­ed a series of eight screen­casts of approx­i­mate­ly five min­utes each for their Help sec­tion using Screen­flow for Mac; top­ics include sign­ing up, adding dis­cus­sions, using the cus­tomized train­ing material.
Member-only Site: http://​www​.reconrab​bi​.net/.

Slim Goodbody Facebook Fan Page

November 8, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Facebook Branding: Slim GoodbodyPop­u­lar chil­dren’s entertainer/educator Slim Good­body is one busy guy: most week­days of the school year find him spread­ing the mes­sage of good health in his trade­mark body suit (“When a Body needs some­body there’s nobody like Good­body!”).

He’s been doing this work for decades now and has a vast store­house of videos, prod­ucts and fans.
Slim came to me to build a brand­ed Face­book presence. 

A typ­i­cal work­load for a Face­book brand­ing project is:

  • Set up the Page;
  • Coor­di­nate with the client for a good pro­file graphic;
  • Adding a num­ber of pho­tos and videos;
  • Help set up a post­ing strategy;
  • Pro­vide phone sup­port to answer ques­tions on best practices;
  • Give feed­back on cam­paign (like Face­book’s “Insights” stats)

For Slim, we decid­ed to rely on Face­book’s native apps as much as pos­si­ble. This became espe­cial­ly impor­tant when Face­book shift­ed it’s feed lay­out (yet again) to focus less on user streams and more on an algorithmically-determined best posts. The more inte­grat­ed your site is with Face­book, the bet­ter chance your pieces will have of show­ing up on Fan’s user streams.

We used Face­book Markup Lan­guage (FBML) to cre­ate cus­tom Page tabs for inte­gra­tion with his exist­ing online store and list­ing of tour dates. We would have liked to use FB’s Events appli­ca­tion but it does­n’t allow for the vol­ume of tour dates nec­es­sary to cov­er a busy enter­tain­er like Slim Goodbody!

See it live: www​.face​book​.com/​s​l​i​m​g​o​o​d​b​ody

Ginny Christensen, Educational Consultant

May 22, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Strategy for GrowthGin­ny Chris­tensen is the force behind Strat­e­gy for Growth, LLC, a Wyn­cote, PA con­sult­ing firm that pro­vides strate­gic plan­ning, board devel­op­ment, exec­u­tive coach­ing, and lead­er­ship team devel­op­ment for inde­pen­dent schools and non­prof­its. The site is fair­ly sim­ple. It’s built in Word­Press and has rudi­men­ta­ry e‑commerce with a Pay­pal option for pur­chas­ing books.

Vis­it: Strat​e​gy​For​Growth​.com

Salem County Special Services School District

November 22, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Daretown School Home - Daretown SchoolThe mis­sion of the Salem Coun­ty Spe­cial Ser­vices School Dis­trict, a region­al edu­ca­tion­al ser­vice agency, is to pro­vide high qual­i­ty, cost-effective pro­grams and ser­vices to the schools and dis­tricts of Salem Coun­ty and Cum­ber­land Coun­ty, New Jer­sey. This site built with what are for me fair­ly gener­ic tools: Mov­able Type as CMS, with Flickr inter­gra­tion. The design style sheet was built from scratch using CSS.

Vis­it: Scsssd​.org

Pen​n​char​ter​.com Media Pages

May 18, 2008
· Martin Kelley

William Penn Charter School Media PagesOne ele­ment of a gen­er­al social media con­sul­tan­cy project I’ve under­tak­en with Philadel­phi­a’s William Penn Char­ter school is a dynam­ic media page. They had col­lect­ed a large num­ber of pho­tos, movies and pod­cast inter­views, but the media page on their site was sta­t­ic and with­out pic­tures. I worked with them to come up with media poli­cies and then built a media site that auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­plays the lat­est Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attrac­tive­ly with CSS. The Flickr part was com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that Flickr does­n’t pro­duce feeds of sets and this required access to it’s API and fair­ly exten­sive Yahoo Pipes manip­u­la­tion. The orig­i­nal pod­casts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to col­lect them togeth­er via Odeo (host­ing) and Feed­burn­er (feed pub­lish­ing), which then pro­vides RSS and iTunes sup­port. The actu­al con­tent for the page is col­lect­ed togeth­er on the Mar​tinkel​ley​.com serv­er and embed­ded into the Penn Char­ter media pages via javascript. Oth­er work with Penn Char­ter includes Google Ana­lyt­ics and Dreamweaver support. 

Update: Pen­n­Char­ter redesigned their web­site in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.

Client Testimonial:

“Mar­tin has worked for our school to inte­grate Web 2.0 technologies
into our com­mu­ni­ca­tion mate­ri­als. Mar­tin is highly-personable and his
is an expert in cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal approach­es. This is a hard match
to find in con­sul­tants.” April 30, 2009

Michael Moul­ton, Tech­nol­o­gy Direc­tor, William Penn Char­ter School.
Hired Mar­tin as a IT Con­sul­tant in 2007, and hired Mar­tin more than once.
Top qual­i­ties: Per­son­able, Expert, High Integrity.