Visit Homeschool LeaderHomeschool Leader HelpHomeschool Leader is a web-based tool for homeschooling parents who would like a tool for tracking subjects, classes, reading lists and, of course, time. It’s a great way for those of us who need to gather this information for reviewers or, in many cases, our own edification.

Because it is web-based Homeschool Leader is only as far away as an internet connection so you don’t have to worry about installing anything on your machine. Signing up is really quick especially if you already have a google account. The setup process will take five minutes at most – before you know it you will be setting up students, sessions and classes.

Terms

Homeschool Leader is pretty easy to use but it helps to know some of the terminology we throw around while you’re using the application. Here’s a list of terms we think you should know.

Armed with that information, Homeschool Leader is designed to be a very easy to use system that takes some of the tedium out of homeschooling and leaves the fun.

It’s true I’m not a writer but I do know that the competition out there is brutal.  Writing groups are a common way for you, the writer, to escape your own head and get some objective advice about your stories.  Reading others’ stories is a good way to learn some things you may not have known or think about things in a slightly different way.

But finding like minded writers locally can be challenging.  Thanks to social websites like Facebook and Twitter you can find others who are interested in being part of a writing group.  All it really takes is two although more opinions are usually helpful. Either way, now you have to decide how you want to share your stories with one another.

There are really only a couple of ways to handle this over long distances:

1. Email.  Just take your Word document (or whatever) and send it to everyone in your group.  They all mark it up with comments (somehow) and sending it back to you in another email along with a message summarizing their critique.  The more people you sent it to, the more copies of your own story come back to you – each marked up in a separate file.
2. Online Word Processors.  I’m talking about Google Docs and the like.  These are great because not only can multiple people be looking at the same document at the same time but the comments (at least in the newest version) will not be “inline” with the story.

These will both work fine, frankly, if you only rarely go through the critiquing process or if the group is made up of only two or three people.  It’s when you get five or more people in a group or the group has a steady stream of new stories making the rounds.  It’s in these cases that a tool like ScribbleSquid can really streamline the whole process.

Let’s take a closer look at the two most common ways of sharing stories mentioned above.

First, there’s email.  Incredibly simple to distribute your stories and have a conversation about it with each critic.  The real problem here is that once you move to multiple critics, things start getting a little messy for the writer.  Each response to your story comes back as a separate email marked up in its own way.  Merging all these into a new revision of the story can be painstaking.  Responding to each comment can be a little tedious as well especially since it’s likely more than one person will be making the same comment.  And speaking of repetition, maybe it would be better if people didn’t bother making comments that they know other people already made.

Next, there’s collaborate editing applications like Google Docs.  Google docs is great when you’re editing your own document or multiple people are editing the same document.  It’s even good (with the latest release) for having others make comments on what you’ve done.  Like email, though, this medium is not really made for the multi-critic, multi-revision world that is story critiquing.   Google Docs does keep a history of revisions but the demarcation for each revision is not up to you.  In fact, I’m not entirely sure how Docs decides it’s time for a new revision.  That’s a problem because the way writing groups generally work is that the author writes a first draft, sends it out, gets comments, makes another draft, sends it out, gets comments, etc.  That is to say, the author decides what makes a revision.  On top of that, an author will probably want to clear away comments made about the last revision.  But he probably still wants to keep the comments around for reference later on.  Google Docs doesn’t really offer that capability.   In fact, Google Docs was just not built for this at all.  As an editor, fantastic.  As a writing group collaboration tool, not so much. 

So ScribbleSquid solves these problems in a couple of ways. 

1. Shared critiques.  When a writers posts his story to ScribbleSquid and shares it with a group, everyone in the group will then be sharing a common canvas, as it were.  All the group members see everyone else’s comments and annotations.  Additionally, the author gets to see everything in one place and respond to each comment in its own thread on that same “canvas”.
2. Revisions.  The writer gets to decide when it’s time for a new revision.  After all the comments have come in and everyone has had their say.  The writer takes those critiques and folds them into his next revision.  He then uploads the new revision to ScribbleSquid where everyone can comment.  Comments from the last revision are gone (although accessible) and there’s a clean slate.  Also, group members can compare two revisions to see what the author changed.
3. Fallback. Any document in ScribbleSquid can be downloaded in whatever format you want or printed or both.  You don’t always want to (or maybe you just can’t) sit in front of the computer to critique.  Print it out and take it with you.  When you do get back to the computer apply the comments you made to the online version. 

So that’s about it for critiques and revisions.  ScribbleSquid offers more enticing features for writers but sharing is really at the core of its mission. 

And more importantly than anything else, let it be known that ScribbleSquid is designed specifically for writing groups.  That’s important, because it means that ScribbleSquid doesn’t try to be all things to all people – just you and your writing group.  And that’s a burden it’s happy to bear.

Beaker is a web-based software test creator and manager.  It’s meant to be used for small shops that need to create tests and use cases for new or existing software.

Beaker Project Page

Live Demo Site

Beaker Docs

I have found that present-day enterprise test management software is needlessly complicated and ends up actually discouraging people from doing standardized testing.  Not to mention it’s outrageously expensive.  I get the sense that the people who decide to buy these things are not the people who actually use them on a day to day basis.

With Beaker you can be up and creating tests in a few minutes.  It won’t take long for you to figure out how it works.  For the most part it tries to stay out of your way while you make and run tests.  If you want, you can (or will be able to) generate reports or snapshots of what tests were run and the results of each.

Beaker is written in Python/Django and can be setup relatively easily.  In addition there is a VMWare appliance that can be downloaded which has Beaker setup and ready to go.  You would need the free VMWare Player to give it a go, though.

Terms

To really understand how Beaker works, you need to know what these terms mean.  They’re kind of self-explanatory but here it is anyway:

Workflow

The intended workflow is something like this:

1. Create an application we’ll call Atomizer
2. Create a new version for that application, say v1.0
3. Create a couple of categories for the application: User Interface, Engine
4. Create a new test for Atomizer – v1.0 – we’ll call it Login and file it under the User Interface category
5. Add some steps to the test like:
   1. Open Chrome
   2. Type in username admin
   3. Type in password password
   4. Press the Login button
   5. Verify that you are redirected to the front page and that your username appears in the upper right corner.
   6. Run the test.  Follow the steps marking each as passed as you go.  If you feel comfortable with the run then mark the whole test passed.

ScribbleSquid DocsTry ScribbleSquid NowScribbleSquid is a web application that has one key mission: to help writers take advantage of everything the online world has to offer. With it, you can:

• Store your manuscripts online — and, optionally, store multiple drafts
  of those manuscripts, keeping a history of their progress from inception, to completion, to submission.
• Form a writing group, share stories with members of the group, and allow them to critique those stories — all online.
• Track manuscript submissions: what stories are currently out, when they
  were submitted, and to whom; how long they’ve been out, and so on.

You can use as many, or as few, of these features as you want. One thing ScribbleSquid emphatically doesn’t want to do is force you to change anything about your process. You can still write everything in your word processor of choice. You can keep all of your work stored on your computer — or wherever you prefer — and only upload what you choose to ScribbleSquid. You can make your manuscripts visible to as many, or as few, people as you like: the entire world, a few select people in your group, or no one at all.

Posted via web from JumbleSquid