SIG WEB Annual Meeting

Lunch @ the 150 Cafe Lounge
Thursday, March 17th 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM • 150 West Jefferson Avenue
Detroit, MI
Make sure to sign up for SIGWEB membership when registering for the 2011 conference. Lunch will be provided by the SIG, all you need to bring is your appetite.

2011 Pre-Conference Sessions

SIGWEB 1: Hot Off the Press! Self-Host Your Own WordPress Blog
8:30 AM – 4:30 PM • Cobo Center
Kelly Kermode, Learning Consultant, Forest Hills Public Schools, and Ben Rimes, Ed Tech
Coordinator, Mattawan Consolidated School
Do you have experience using Blogger or Edublogs? Have you ever wanted to have your own personal website? Would you like to choose your own domain name? Want to learn how to install WordPress on your own web server and alter it to your liking? Integrate Facebook, Twitter, Readers and RSS feeds to instantly add content to your website? Learn how to set up your own website from start to finish? We’ll take you through the process of working with a website from the behind-the-scenes control panel to publishing content using the most popular content management software in the world, WordPress. Along the way you’ll learn the technical side of managing a website. Participants will get their own domain name. Take control of your web space and come to the session!

SIGWEB 2: Ruby on Rails for Dummies
8:30 AM – 4:30 PM • Cobo Center
Jeff Kupperman, Associate Professor, University of Michigan-Flint, and Project Director, Interactive Communications and Simulations Group, University of Michigan
Want to create your own social network from scratch? Develop a website to help analyze data within your district? Or perhaps you’re just looking to create your own version of YouTube? Unleash your inner geek with this full-day session on using one of the most powerful open source tools available for creating your own database-driven websites from scratch. We will go through the basics of coding with Ruby on Rails and getting a handle on this powerful rapid development framework for web application creation. This session is for advanced users; you
should have basic familiarity with database software, elementary unix commands, remote server access, HTML, and text editing software. Participants should bring a laptop with the following software: 1.) A text editor capable of SFTP (e.g, for Mac: Textwrangler; for Windows: Komodo Edit or UltraEdit); 2.) A terminal program (Mac: Terminal; Windows: Putty or similar); 3.) A MySQL database browser (e.g., for Mac: SequelPro; for Windows: Navicat Lite)