The Green Cup

I talked last week about WebTop – the West Virginia Department of Education’s virtual desktop and accompanying tools. One of those tools is WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities is a closed social network for state education. At the moment it’s inhabited by the employees of the state’s schools systems. But eventually the plan is to include students.

WebTop Communities home page I get when I’m logged in.

WebTop Communities gets compared to MySpace by WVDE staff. I’m a member of MySpace and Facebook. I like Facebook more. MySpace seems a little more cumbersome to me than Facebook.

There are some ways that I think WebTop Communities is like MySpace, some ways it is like Facebook, and some ways it is different from both of them.

WebTop Communities is like both MySpace and Facebook in a number of ways. It includes its own messaging system where you can send other members emails, and it will notify you that you have email waiting. But MySpace sends you an email telling you that someone has sent you an “email” on MySpace, and you then have to login at MySpace to read that message (which I find inconvenient); Facebook and WebTop Communities both send you the text of your message in an email, and you only have to login to the service if you want to reply.

My friends at WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities, MySpace, and Facebook all three allow you to formalize relationships by “friending” people within the network. But Facebook and MySpace require those relationships to be reciprocal: I friend you, you friend me back (or approve my “friend request”) and then we’re friends. WebTop Communities allows you to display people as “friends” on your page without them listing you as friends on their page (and vice versa). And in that sense it is more like Twitter (which allows you to “follow” people who don’t follow you).

My WebTop Communities profile page.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook (or Twitter for that matter), WebTop does not have a place for personal, status, or “mood” updates. On Facebook there’s a window when you login that asks “What’s on Your Mind?” On MySpace the Status and Mood page asks “What are your doing right now?” And Twitter asks simply “What are you doing?” There is nothing like a “status update” on WebTop Communities. That makes it a little more like LinkedIn – a professional network. Social, but professional…

WebTop Communities is more like Facebook than MySpace in the ease with his smaller groups within the larger social network can be formed. So for example, I have a closed community within WebTop specifically of staff at my school. I moderate the community, decide how visible it is to users who are not members of my community. And I determine who can be a member of the community. MySpace may be able to do this (I’m not absolutely sure), but such pages are legion on Facebook. WebTop Communities makes them very easy to create and use.
Like both Facebook and MySpace, there is a blog tool in WebTop Communities. And recent blogposts show up on the WebTop Communities home page.

My blog page at WebTop Communities.

So I guess my main point is that the community is unique. While its appearance hasn’t changed much in the year since I joined (my first blog post at WebTop was July 23, 2008), I suspect it’s capacity has increased greatly and the ideas for its future have multiplied.

I think WebTop Communities feels more like Facebook. MySpace has always had a problem with spam that is, well, in poor taste. I’ve rarely experienced that on Facebook (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). I hope that WebTop Communities will become more like Facebook in that Facebook has seen a proliferation of applications for users – games, quizzes, etc. I know that the WebTop apps would be educational. But if we’re building a social network to include students in an educational setting, I think such applications would have potential.

Finally, Facebook is growing. MySpace isn’t. I hope that WebTop grows…

This week my new tech tool was screen capture. I used a program I’d come across a while back (but had never actually installed) from a company called Etrusoft.

!Quick Screen Capture (the name of their program) was easy to install and quite easy to use. I used it to caputre a series of screens that have to do with the West Virginia Department of Education’s WebTop program.

WebTop is an cloud-based personal desktop that West Virginia educators and (eventually) students can sign up for. It allows them to maintain their own access to a particular set of tools and documents despite having to move from classroom to classroom (or even school to school, depending on their job).

Let me show you some of the screens I captured (you can click on them to get a larger image)…

To log onto WebTop you go to http://wvde.k12.wv.us. The page looks like this:

In the blue box on the left of the page, the second option down is “WEBTOP LOGIN.” Click on that and you get this page:

I fed in my user ID and password:

And I got this (my own virtual desktop):

I haven’t done much with mine yet. So you might call this the standard look. Let’s take a look at the four folders on the WebTop. Going from left to right, the first folder is the WVDE forlder. Inside you find this:

The folder contains:

• a shortcut to the State Department of Education website (the little A+ thinggy)
• a link to a page that will let you check your state issued email account (and you have to have an “access” email account to get a WebTop account)
• a link to WebTop Communities (kind of like Facebook for state teachers; I’ll look at WebTop Communities in some detail on another day).
• Several Google tools that you can maintain separately from any personal Google account you might have.
• A couple of other tools that at this point I haven’t used.
• And a link to page where you can look up other teachers you know of in the state and find their email address (a handy tool).

I used this box most often to click on through to the WebTop Communities page.

When you open the “Teacher Tools” folder you get this:

The folder gives me access to the Manhattan Virtual Classroom. I also get a link to upcoming professional development opportunities, some online textbooks, and a place where teachers can check their own certifications.

The third folder is on project based learning. Inside:

There’s the Manhattan Virtual Classroom, an eportfolio tool called “epearl,” and some Google tools.

The last folder is for student tools and it currently contains just a link to Acuity, the state’s benchmark assessment program.

You get the idea. You get the idea about WebTop. And you get the idea about screen capture. The only problem with screen capture is that the Etrusoft tool isn’t free. I may pay for it (eventually) but I’ll look for a good free screen capture tool first.

On Wednesday I have a workshop on WebTop in Charleston. For now, I think I’ll play the chess game featured in WebTop’s software folder…