What is Digitally Supported Literacy?

Literacy and numeracy is a big problem in New Zealand, with 1 in 5 having low functionaly literacy. One of our clients, Adult Learning Support, is involved in helping adults who struggle with their reading, writing, spelling and maths.

We are working with them to create electronic versions of short stories that have embedded support for struggling readers. These take the form of videos with the text of the story on screen, narration by Nelson's Matt Lawrey, and visual cues to help them find the line they should be reading and "hoops", like slurs in music to help them read words in chunkys which is a skill developed by good readers.

The Work is being funded by AKO Aotearoa and will be released with the creative commons licence so that others can build on the work we have done.

We've been beavering away for sometime on a redesign for the Avoca Design website and wwe are finally showing it off to the world. There are still one or two small tweaks for us to finish but overall we are delighted.

Be on the look out for more additions to our training library over the next couple of months now that we have a good platform to display the videos on.

CSSedit, by MacRabbit, is a life changing CSS editor that saves us hours every week. It is honestly one of the two major reasons that I switched to the macintosh platform in 2007. Live Previews and quick searching huge CSS files are just some of the beautiful features of this programme. 

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How can one piece of software make all the difference?

The first piece of magic is the live previews and style sheet overrides. CSSEdit provides a browser window with a 'Xray' inspector that lets you easily browse the different elements on the page. This gives you the class or identifier for the element that you want to style. You can then override the CSS file on the server with a local copy. Magic, now you can make changes and see the results in real time and iron out any kinks before uploading it to the server. 

Once you have identified the CSS you want to edit the it does a fantastic job of exposing all the CSS options at a glance. It is a great reminder of the options available. 

Nothing is perfect

We do wish it would include some tools that are common in other solutions such as Firebug (for Firefox) like the computed style that tells you what the rendered size of each element is which is very handy for trouble shooting. We also use Xylescope a lot to find out where an element is taking the CSS commands from. This can be extremely useful in resolving conflicts between style sheets. It would be easier if it were rolled up in one tool. 

Daylite, from Marketcircle, is a great application for Calendaring and managing all the information that you need to keep about People, companies, projects, work opportunities and much more. Like CSSedit, it is the other key 3rd party application that convinced us to shift OS platforms from windows to OS X.

It's like Outlook on steroids

And not the 1980’s Eastern Block kind either but more the modern kind that provide performance without the hit to the looks….

I used Outlook on the PC (still do at my other work) and I must admit it does somethings really well, like customisable forms and views. However, the fact that it only really plays well with others via an expensive exchange server set-ups has always been a proverbial pain in the behind in the small office set-ups I have worked in.

I love the fact that Daylite works in a single user set-up but can scale to 50 users (both local and over the internet) without having to add greatly to the complexity of your hardware or software set-ups. Remote workers are catered for extremely well with off-line copies and synchronisation since version 3.5 is lightening fast.

Also anyone who has been stung by outlook creating but not exporting custom fields will understand the need for a real database. Also being a real database it has proper reports. The reporting engine is very powerful but has a little bit of a learning curve.