SubscribeGlossary
Glossary of terms used by the NPS TAC.
- Blog
- n. An easy-to-update website characterized by dated entries displayed in reverse chronological order.
- Category
- n. A feature that allows an author to group similar entries, generally by applying freely chosen descriptors or tags. Past content is easier to retrieve from categorical files than from chronological archives.
- CMS
- Disambiguation: The acronym CMS usually means one of these things: Content Management System or Course Management System
- Content Management System
- A database-driven system focused on managing one or more forms of content.
- Course Management System
- Refers to a set of systems focused on supporting the development of school courses (curriculum). A leading example is Moodle.
- Comment
- n. A feature that allows readers to publicily respond to blog entries. Commenting can be open to all blog visitors or restricted to designated individuals. Comments are often moderated in an attempt to control comment spam and, on some blogs, unwanted comments.
- Edline
- A school portal solution offered by the company of the same name. It's a closed/proprietary solution that is available only as a hosted service (Software as a Service).
- Hyperlink
- n. A reference, or link, within an electronic document that, if clicked, leads to another point in the same document or to another electronic document, or that triggers the download of an electronic file. Generally displayed as highlighted anchor text, an icon, or an image.
- LAMP
- Systems based on Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database server and PHP programming language.
- Drupal
- An open source CMS built using the LAMP technologies. See the website at www.drupal.org.
- Entry
- n. Inidividual blog items. May contain, among other elements, a headline, body text, photos, video, audio files, author name, date and time stamps and more. Sometimes called a post or an article.
- Joomla
- An open source CMS built using the LAMP technologies. See the website at www.joomla.org
- Moodle
- Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz.
- News aggregator
- n. Software that allows a user to subscribe to and read constantly updated newsfeeds. Can reside locally on the desktop or be a web service accessed via a browser. Sometimes called a newsreader or feedreader.
- Newton Schools Foundation
- NSF = Newton Schools Foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity dedicated to private fund-raising which it then uses to underwrite grants to teachers for improved curriculum development. For more information, see the NSF website.
- NPS
- Newton Public Schools (http://www.newton.k12.ma.us)
- Open Source
- Solutions where the customer is allowed to have a copy of the source code is open for customers to obtain.
- RSS
- Really Simply Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary. n. An XML-based format used to generate a newsfeed.
- Software as a Service
- TAC
- The Technology Advisory Council (TAC) of the Newton Public Schools (NPS). Also sometimes abbreviated as NPS TAC.
- Taxonomy
- The technical term that Drupal uses to refer to categories as a way to categorize/organize related content. Taxonomy contains a broader meaning because it breaks the idea of category into several discrete parts: 1. Vocabulary -- a collection of categories. For instance, on this site we have a vocabulary for the glossary, one for the FAQ and one for the categorization of regular content. 2. Term -- a category name within a given vocabulary 3. Heirarchy/Flat/Free -- whether a vocabulary allows for its terms to be heirarchical or not (flat), and whether users are allowed to add terms by "Free Tagging" content 4. Synonyms -- other category names that should be viewed as the same category 5. Related terms -- other terms in the same vocabulary that are directly related to a given term.
- Web 2.0
- n. A label applied to technologies, servies, and social networks that build upon the Web as a computing platform rather than merely as a hyperlinked collection of largely static web pages. In practice, services dubbed Web 2.0 reflect open standards, decentralized infrastructure, flexibility, simplicity, and, perhaps most important, active user-particpation. Examples, blogs, wikis, craigslist.com.
- Wiki
- n. A type of collaborative, knowledge-based website that allows readers to write and edit content, maintaining a record of all changes. From Hawaian wikiwiki, quick.
- WYSIWYG
- WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product.[3] It is commonly used for word processors, but has other applications, such as Web (HTML) authoring. See more at WYSIWYG on Wikipedia.