Congratulations to Sebbie. Oxford here you come.

And congratulations to Alex. All the best for Cambridge.

I have launched the long awaited revamp of the Aluminium Site which finally removes frames from the design and tries to make it look better on all screen resolutions. It used to look like this:

And now it looks like this:

An improvement I hope. You can check the new site out at http://davyson.com/aluminium.

Wow! I just found this really neat tool for students to keep track of notes that they make. It is called stu.dicio.us and it most certainly looks like they are in the opening stages of release. Right now you have to make your notes public if you use the service and there is no “About Us” or “Contact Us” link anywhere on the site. Which is why I am having to resort to a blog post to pass this message to them.

The interface is beautifully simple. I mean it is just like you want it to be. Zero tolerance for any clutter of any description. The todos are particularly well done, you can add them for a specific class of yours and then they appear in the list sorted by date. Clicking them crosses them out - i.e. done, and alt-clicking deletes them. Todos created in days gone by don’t show up which is a shame, but perhaps it makes sense. I think the ones that you don’t do should roll over to the next day, since we are talking about students doing this with the stuff they have to do is often possible. The other side of the screen is all about notes which you have to enter in a box that I would claim is a tad small but apart from that it is really great. You can just write a few littel tidbits about the lesson that you have had, or that you are due to have. I would prefer the notes to work more like a diary personally with some arrangement for recording the date on them too and having an overflow system for when the frontpage explodes with notes (i.e. after about a month of usage).

All in all though it is nice and I think that I will use it. Please though add a feedback link!

Today I have released some more A2 biology content to complement to Module 4 notes that I currently offer. This time it is Module 5 notes which is the environment section. It is rather timely with the exam in just a few days now. The notes cover all the content that was covered in class in preparation for the module and take up just six sides of A4. I normally like to offer as many formats as is possible but since the notes are just scans there is not much need for alternatives to jpgs. I used the exact same interface that I took from the Module 4 notes and just changed the content because it worked well with Module 4, and of course it saved me a bit of time.

It is likely that this will be the last addition to the A2 section of the site until the exams are all over. Which is now just over a week away. When all is done I do plan to add a lot more items to the site over my long summer off. This will involve the notes for Module 7 along with a load of other new stuff.