"All GIS in one Journal"- site day's 10/25-11/16 1/10LFCC IT, Mentor: Richie Crim For the last several weeks of site I have only focused on the designing of my website for the touch screen kiosk I hope to put in the front office. I have been working with Richie a lot on the details about the kiosk itself. The first step of my project was to talk to Mr. Nelson. I met with him and discussed several details of the project and the precautions and stipulations of the kiosk and project. We decided that the kiosk was a go as long as it was funded by grants or other funds; there weren't enough school funds to be able to cover the kiosk, which is a little under $5,000. Mr. Nelson suggested that we allow the kiosk to be for student use first, because he felt students would benefit more from the kiosk itself. The next thing we discussed is the location of where the kiosk will be placed. We both had the same idea of putting the kiosk in the commons area near the bank and warrior trading post. This way the kiosk can be monitored during all lunch periods and there is normally a teacher on duty during the other periods throughout the day. We also talked about putting it under the watch of a surveillance camera to ensure maximum protection. After my talk with Mr. Nelson I headed back to site for the next 2 weeks and got working on the website for the kiosk. The first step in designing the website was to see what the audience of the site would most like to see. So I typed up a survey and handed it out to several students. Touch Screen Kiosk Survey If a Touch screen Kiosk was put in the front office for teacher and student use, what are some things you would like to see or find beneficial on the web page or app. For example: School Map, Calendar, and Lunch Menus. I got a great response from the survey. The students had several reoccurring themes such as lunch menus, a combined school calendar, access to Edline, and a school map. So with the audience's input I got to work with Richie. As I worked on the design he would always be doing something to help me out, whether it was looking up grants, or figuring out the HTML code that I was vigorously searching for. After about two or three weeks the basic outline of the site had been designed. The site had to have a main home page in which linked the user to other tabs. However, a challenge was met when I realized that I had to include a back button to the websites that I was linking to because the user doesn't have access to the menu/URL bar when the website is but into kiosk mode. This was a huge problem because it's impossible to call Edline up and ask tem to but a link back to my homepage. So I did some research at home and came up with a solution. I can have the webpages like Edline, open in a pop up window when their link is clicked, the window wont be full screen so that way the user will be able to close out of the link when they are finished with their session. This was a major challenge that I was able to overcome but there were more to come. After the four weeks the site was up and running, only on my computer of course, but it looked pretty impressive (not to boast). I had all of the links working perfectly; they were all based off of PDF's and links that were already SHS's on site. I had actually finished in a decent amount of time, but as soon as the day for celebration came, a horrible set back hit. I came into my site on Friday after noon ready to show Richie the finally finished site. As I opened my homepage to show him it came up and looked amazing, slick, clean, eye appealing, and simple in nature, then it went from great to horrible. I clicked the first link on the site, didn't work. The second,
same result. The third, same as the first two. At this point I start to realize something is definitely wrong. After a little bit of searching I realized that my biggest set back was upon us, Sherando had removed it's entire site and converted their site over to Edline. Oh what an evening that was, frustration was putting it lightly. Now that the Sherando site had been taken down none of the links on my web page worked and I had to rewrite all of the web pages code to establish the new site. The recoding set me back another week and a half to make sure everything would run smoothly with the new Edline transition. Luckily most of the files I need on the new site were PDFs, which made it a lot simpler to link. After the new site was finished, I finally got to allow Richie to review it. Richie and the web designer at LFCC both took a look at the site and links to check for usability, problems, and appeal. They both gave me great advice on how I could enhance my site. After I took their suggestions into account I refurbished the site and put on some finishing touches. After the site was finished Richie wanted to show me a closer look at the kiosk itself. We took a week at site to look at the "insides" of the kiosk. I learned that the kiosk itself just runs like a regular desktop computer. It has a CPU, with mouse and keyboard in the body of the kiosk stand. The kiosk itself is fairly simple in design and I found that it would be easy to set up. After we looked at the internal parts, Richie allowed me to explore the properties and preferences that you must apply to the computer to run efficiently in kiosk mode. We took a look at setting the computer to never sleep, running webpages in kiosk mode, and several other usability features that were pretty common. Then was the time to get ready for presentations and showcase. They both went very well and I got very informative feed back. After my presentation I added a few new categories to the website that my classmates suggested. I also got some advice from the Web Design teacher at James Wood. He suggested I use FTP, which is a form of publishing. So now my next steps in the process of my project is first to find and receive a grant to fund my project, which hopefully happens very, very soon. After the kiosk is purchased I will look into publishing my web site so I'm able to access it over the Internet rather than just from my computer. This is where FTP will come into play. I spoke with Richie about FTP's and he said next site visit we can meet with the web designer to establish first what an FTP truly is, I have some background information, but not enough to be comfortable in the subject. So I greatly look forward to my next site visit to learn more about web design and I defiantly can not wait for the next semester at LFCC.