LeMill Blog

After a period of slow development, LeMill is now updated to version 3.1 with some nice new features.

• Major improvements in handling of media pieces when creating web pages or exercises. Pieces can have captions and their metadata can be edited on spot.
• Added share button for recommending resources in social media (Facebook, Google+, Twitter).
• Added Delete account -link.
• Removed spam/bot users and improved tools for removing them in future.

More updates coming soon!

An important server update has popped up and we have to do an update as soon as possible.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

LeMill will be unavailable for about 1 hour during the night between Friday 29th and Saturday 30th of April. LeMill keeps growing, so we need to add more capacity to our servers. We’ll be right back!

Update: The maintenance went smoothly and LeMill was unavailable for only 9 minutes. Kudos to our service provider, Gocept.

A small bugfix update to LeMill was issued at Wednesday afternoon.

Hi, with version 3.0.12 there are few fixes and some great new features for visual editor in LeMill, the one that is used whenever something more complex needs to be written.

• Adding and removing cells to and from existing tables is now supported. There are several buttons for these specific tasks that are activated only when cursor is over a table.
  

  Buttons for adding and removing rows and columns.

• There is a button and a special sheet for adding and previewing LaTeX -code for mathematics and physics equations. LeMill now uses Google’s API to provide the TeX-to-image transformation, so it should be fast. See How to Write Equations in LeMill.
• There is a button for adding rarer unicode symbols for math characters and Greek alphabeth etc. See help page for Drawing Symbols.
• The editor itself is updated to TinyMCE’s latest version, 3.4b2. It should provide a better support for IE 9-family and the engine for reading and filtering html is rewritten.
• Also LeMill’s engine for parsing edited text has been rewritten in a simpler and more readable fashion. There may be some oddities in first few days. In worst case, if tags are  lost and page becomes unreadable when editing, use ‘History’ to restore a working version.

Our hosting company is moving to newer, faster servers and the move will require our main database to be out of service for the time required for transfer of files. The break will occur at late friday night, probably between 22-03.

Otherwise, the year has started well with another small upgrade last weekend (8-9.1). Added features include:

• Added a link to member’s collections at member’s profile page.
• Added a link to browse those resources that don’t have language / subject / tags set. Now anyone can help to add languages / subjects / tags to those  resources that miss these. Especially language is important, because if it is not set, the resource is often not listed.
• Removed option ‘other people can only edit a copy of this resource’ as it was used with too light causes. Incremental evolution of learning resources and co-operation is what LeMill endorses.
• Added support for embedding Google Docs, Presentations, Spreadsheet, Forms and Drawing into webpages and exercises.
• Translations are temporarily disabled as we are designing a better solution for supporting them without creating unnecessary or unintended copies of resources.

Hello,

We’ve been busy preparing a major new release for LeMill. Initially small changes in interface and visual layout have snowballed into quite great changes in how simple can LeMill be.

At best case, the update will take few hours at fr-sat night, but if we find last minute problems, it can mean the service to be down on saturday and sunday. When the upgrade is finished we will post a detailed view of new features and changes.

LeMill 3.0 front page

LeMill 3.0 content section

Cloud of languages in tools section

Last week we organized a LeMill design sprint. LeMill was launched more than 4 years ago and it needs some rethinking on the design and user experience. We have developed a lot of small new features but the overall design has not changed much. New features that were added gradually have also resulted some issues with the consistency of LeMill user interface.

You can see the results of the sprint in the next version of LeMill that will hopefully come out by the end of September. It will have a new wider page layout and redesigned main menu. We have also developed a much more user-friendly way for reordering text blocks, media pieces and questions on web pages and exercises.

A more detailed summary of the design sprint is posted at hanspoldoja.net.

Preparing for annual ITK-days, the largest education technology event in Finland, we had to finally push an update to LeMill. There are few interesting features and some inner changes that prepare the base for nice new things in near future.

List of changes:

• New PILOT-player: should be more robust than the previous one and includes a fullscreen mode to make it better suitable to show in class.
• Embedding PILOTs. Pilots can be embedded into your blog much like YouTube videos or LeMill’s collections. When viewing a PILOT resource, the embed code is on the left side. Copy it to your clipboard and paste into your blog. (The feature to notice that now this is embedded into another page and offer a link back to LeMill is not there yet.)
• New text editor. Our previous easy-to-use text editor was quite problematic to maintain or modify, and we shifted to use tinyMCE-editor. For those who use WordPress it should be familiar already: I’ve found that it is easier to modify and because of its huge userbase, it should be easy to upgrade. I’ve tried to keep the functionality as much like it was before; the table editor needs still some work, as tinyMCE:s default has too many features (and buttons) and the current table button doesn’t do enough alone. (To remove table, now it is easiest to switch to source mode and remove everything between table-tag and /table.) As a new feature I added Undo- and Redo-buttons. There are lots and lots features available for that editors, but our policy has always been to try to keep them in minimum to not distract with superfluous adjusting.
• Rewrote adding Media Pieces to Webpages and other similar resources. The difference is now only cosmetic, but inside there has been a prelimenary work for easier resource editing with less visible loading and saving of pages.
• With large groups and long lists of friends, only the first five names are displayed and other are folded behind ‘Show more…’-link. Don’t worry, clicking it won’t cause a slow page load.
• Simplified steps to create content and REMOVED ability to create Presentations, School Projects and Print Resources. The reason for this is explained by Hans in previous post. The existing resources are still there and won’t go away. They may be converted to other resource types at some point.
• Added resource tags to bee visible in left side bar. We hope that this way they get more use, and when they get more use, resources will have more tags and finding resources becomes easier.
• What else? Small fixes here and there, faster section front pages — the problem where loading a content section’s front page seems to take forever is now permanently solved. Generally smaller page loads.

We are happy to announce that LeMill community has reached 10000 members today. Most of them are primary and secondary school teachers who are looking for a simple solution to create and share web-based learning resources. LeMill allows them to create various types of web-based learning resources (web pages, exercises, lesson plans, etc), descriptions of educational methods and tools.

LeMill has been online since May 2006. During this time teachers have created 7808 learning resources and descriptions of 3960 educational methods and 879 tools. All content that is created in LeMill is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. This makes LeMill one of the largest collections of open educational resources.

LeMill community has members from 61 countries. However, we still have not gained much attention in English speaking countries. The most active users of LeMill are in Georgia and Estonia. It is difficult to say exact number of members from each country because many people do not completely fill up their user profiles. If we look at the amount of resources in different languages, number of members and Google Analytics statistics, then we can estimate that about 70% of LeMill use comes from Georgia and 15% from Estonia. These two countries have been so active because the national ICT agencies (Deer Leap Foundation and Tiger Leap Foundation) have promoted LeMill among the teachers. There are smaller LeMill communities also in Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania and Finland.

LeMill was designed and developed as part of European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme project CALIBRATE. The continuation of development was supported by Tiger Leap Foundation. The dissemination of LeMill is supported by ESF AVO project. LeMill project is currently run by Media Lab at the Aalto University (Finland) together with Centre for Educational Technology at the Tallinn University (Estonia).

We would like to thank all teachers who have used LeMill and all institutions who have supported us so far.