Category Archives: Django

Going mobile with TeachRock.org

CSS, Django, Education, JavaScript, Mobile, Responsive Design, UX

Teachrock website mobileWhether you are looking for in-depth information about The Birth of the Electric Guitar, The Roots of Country Rock or the Divergent Paths of Gangsta Rap and Conscious HipHop, or if you are simply seeking some terrific entertainment for an idle hour – Rock and Roll: An American Story is a fabulous online educational resource offering free access to news articles, rock artist bio pages, and rare photos and videos.

Launched in the Fall of 2013, TeachRock.org is a standards-aligned curriculum for grades 6-12 that teaches American social history through the story of American popular music: Jazz, R&B, rock and roll, soul, punk, even including today’s hip hop. And as of now the website is also responsive!

The original site was primarily desktop-centric but The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation realized that a growing portion of its traffic was coming from mobile and tablet devices. They did not want to completely redesign the site but turned to Boyle Software to adapt the existing site, making it responsive. We kept the page layout for desktop as is and used CSS magic to make it look beautiful on mobile devices as well. At the same time, the homepage was modified to highlight more of their amazing content and a new Curriculum page was added to help both teachers and students navigate the curriculum more easily.  For those about to (responsively) rock, we salute you!

Rock and Roll: An American Story

Clients, CSS, Django, Education, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, Python

Rock and Roll: An American StorySteven Van Zandt – aka Little Steven of the E Street Band, The Sopranos, etc. – was fed up and wanted to bring about a change. Seeing escalating drop-out rates in American high schools, coupled with increasing cuts to funding for arts-related educational programs, Van Zandt decided he needed to do something to help turn things around. His vision was to bring the thrill he experienced as a youth, listening to and learning about rock and roll and R&B music, to the classroom of today; to give teachers a deep, interactive way to present the history of rock and roll to kids who might not know where today’s pop music comes from. In doing this, he hoped to keep kids in school and engaged with American history itself.

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