LeMill Blog

Hi,

With LeMill winter sprint in Helsinki has been updated to version 3.1.3, bringing few bug fixes and some helpful features for maintaining quality content. Precisely:

• New exercise feedback form
• Maximum points for each exercise can be assigned when editing an exercise.
• History view gives more information about previous versions and restoring old versions is more robust.
• Some links within content contained unnecessary ‘lemill-server’ in their path. It has been removed.
• Discussions moved from separate page to comments below content.
• Unwanted becoming an author can be fixed. Custom text can be used to replace ‘Authors’, if necessary — if the given names match LeMill members, there will be a link to member.
• Vocational education added as a possible target group for learning resources.

Also notice a new thing in LeMill front page! There is an introductory video made by Anna Keune to give new users a tour  and a one minute explanation of LeMill.

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.

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

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 now it is possible to download collections as PDF booklets. The booklet will contain a table of content, teaching and learning story and content, methods and tools that have been added to the collection. In addition to PDF booklet it is also possible to download collections as zipped HTML files and SCORM packages. An example PDF booklet that is created from LeMill collection is embedded below.

Töö allikatega, viitamine ja viidete haldamine e-õppes

Hi,

LeMill.net was down for a while in 20.1, as we had to rebuild all search indexes and the process seemed to be sensitive for all incoming traffic, so we had to shut down access to even read-only mode. Now it is back. Benefit of that downtime was that now the searches work better with all-georgian search phrases and other less common character sets.

I hope you like it.

Jukka

We released LeMill version 2.5 already more than a week ago, but haven’t announced it in this blog yet, because there were some problems that had to be fixed. This release comes with two new templates in the Content section and more flexible editing options.

Lesson plan template has special fields for goals / objectives, description of the lesson and evaluation / assessment. Current use of LeMill shows that in some countries teachers create quite a lot of lesson plans (see lesson plans from Czech teachers). We hope that this new template will simplify creating and finding lesson plans.

Second new template enables teachers to share information about school projects and find project partners. Currently we have quite a lot of school projects in the Methods section but at some point we plan to clean up the Methods section and move existing school projects to the new template. Then Methods section will contain only context free descriptions of educational methods that can be reused in any collection.

Both new templates have also special fields for linking related content, methods and tools. You can see example lesson plan and school project.

Besides new templates we have made some changed to the way people can edit content. From this version draft content is not visible for other users by default. This will help to keep test content hidden and have only real learning resources visible. Those users who want to work collaboratively on a draft version can make the draft visible for others.

We have also some plans about publishing ready textbooks in LeMill. One of these projects will hopefully be educational technology handbook for Estonian schools. For textbooks it is important to have a stable version that is not edited frequently. Therefore first author can now choose if other people will edit the same resource or a copy is made for them when they start editing. All the copies will be linked to the original version in a same way as translations are linked with each other.

We have released a small update with version 2.4.5. This release contains mostly internal changes that are not visible for end users. These changes are needed for new features in the upcoming 2.5 and better handling of large amounts of content.

We have also changed the way how resources are stored in LeMill database. It means that URL’s in the Content section have changed. Before all the URL’s in the Content section had the same structure: http://lemill.net/content/title. Now the structure of the URL is based on the content type: http://lemill.net/content/type/title.

Some examples of new URL’s:

• http://lemill.net/content/webpages/lemill-faq
• http://lemill.net/content/presentations/learning-resources-and-copyright
• http://lemill.net/content/exercises/british-newspapers-listening-comprehension
• http://lemill.net/content/pilots/1-hobuse-mure-pilot
• http://lemill.net/content/pieces/barnacle-goose
• http://lemill.net/content/references/oer-commons

If you have made links to LeMill content, please find some time to update links in your blog or web page.

This release also introduced some new bugs, but we will do our best to fix them soon. After that we will continue working with LeMill 2.5. In this release we are planning to have a long awaited possibility to upload Powerpoint files as presentations (in the same way as it works in SlideShare) and two new templates (lesson plan and school project).

We wish you all the best for the new school year and hope that you will find LeMill useful in your teaching and learning.

We have a few good news today. After a little break we have released a new version again. With this release we have worked a lot with the back-end of LeMill. Now things should work faster as they did before.

The most important new feature is added to the exercise template. Now it is possible to see if your answers were correct immediately after submitting the exercise. In addition to web-based feedback you can also get e-mail with your results.

We have also improved the reviewer role. Reviewer is a user who has some additional rights. Reviewers ca convert resources from one section to another. For example if some non-method is published in the Methods section it can be safely converted to a web page in the Content section. Reviewers can also delete resources to clean up LeMill from test content. We are planning to give reviewer rights to some of our most active users. If you are interested to become a reviewer you can contact us through the feedback form.

This is the first release that is completed with our new funding. After the end of CALIBRATE project in March 2008 we were able to receive support from Tiger Leap Foundation in Estonia. With this funding we are planning to have four major releases this year.

The third good news is that we have a blog now. I copied old posts from our personal blogs and LeMill development group to this blog, so you have all the history and future here. Have a nice summer and keep following our blog!