I was asked to give feedback to one of my Green Party colleagues on their new wiki and I suggested they add a movie trailer from YouTube for a movie fundraiser that is happening in their electorate. This lead me to start putting together instructions on how to do this that then turned into a rather comprehensive guide to adding YouTube videos to a range of online spaces including Wikispaces, PBWiki, Blogger (in post), Blogger (in html gadget in sidebar), Blogger (in video bar gadget in the sidebar), Edublogs (in post), and Edublogs (in Text widget in the sidebar). Also included is how to play with the width and height settings when you embed it. I incorrectly said Blogspot instead of Blogger throughout and will fix this up at some point. In the meantime, enjoy!
I have come across two very interesting web 2.0 tools in the last couple of weeks that could make blogging more attractive to both teachers writing blogs and to the community who read blogs.
This is an extremely simple concept. Anyone can get a blog going by sending an email to post@posterous.com. This email is converted into a blog post on a site that is automatically setup for your email address. Every time you send another email from the same email address it will be converted and added to this website as the latest post. Even better is the fact that if you send photo, mp3 or file attachments, these will be automatically added in a very web-friendly format for people to view or listen to online. I tried it out and the results of this can be seen at http://suzie_ogyqs.posterous.com/ You will notice that the name of my site is not that userfriendly. If I had set up an account BEFORE sending in my first email, I could have chosen the part of the URL that goes before posterous.com. As it is, the first time I logged into Posterous after sending my first email, it gave me the chance to choose my own URL so you will see when you click on the link above, it redirects to suzievesper.posterous.com.
Many of the parent communities we work with are not all that familiar with technologies such as RSS. However, most people have email and will check this regularly. Nourish allows you to turn a feed (or a combination of feeds) into something that people can subscribe to by email. You can add a button to your website where people can click on and add their email addresses into to subscribe. You can also add addresses in yourself so that those people will get the email newsletter. People will be able to unsubscribe by clicking a link in their email if they don’t want to receive these emails. This would also be great for someone who wants to keep check on the activity happening in online spaces such as a school ICT lead teacher or a principal. They could combine all the feeds from the teacher blogs/ wikis and have these being sent as a digest to their email. I am going to add a button for people to subscribe to this blog very shortly!
I just wanted to give a big ‘ups’ to the teachers that I have worked with over this year who have now started to do their own blogs. Today I worked with the staff of one school (in groups of three) to get new edublogs up and running for their classes. Everyone was so enthusiastic and really enjoyed the tools at their finger tips when making their blogs. I must say that I am getting more and more impressed with Edublogs – particularly the Pages function which basically means that you have the benefits of a wiki and blog combined. I do find a couple of things mildly frustrating such as that when I send an image up to the editor when posting and try to resize by dragging the corners, it does not stay resized when I publish. I know that I can go and change the dimensions in the insert/ edit image area but it would be handy to resize without using this. The other very small thing that I think could be improved is having a widget named Html rather than having to know that you use a Text widget. It might also be handy to have something written in the template thumbnails to let you know which you can customise the image of and which ones you can’t.
However, these are very minor things and they don’t interfere with me being able to use the blog. The page feature more than makes up for any small irritations and I plan to add some to this blog in the very near future.
It would be great if some of you out there could go and leave comments for my fledgling teacher bloggers. Nothing is more motivating than knowing that someone is out there and values what you do. Below is the link to a page in our cluster wiki with all the blogs linked to:
I have also spent time working on Teacher Portal to make it easier to navigate and to simplify the interface. I am quite happy with it now. While some of the content is specific to our cluster, I think this could be a useful resource for other people as well and it would be great if anyone wants to add some of their own content into it.
Let me know if you think it could be improved and what you’d like to see added
Here I am comfortably housed in my new home at Edublogs and I thought that my first post here would be to explain the reasons for my move.
No ‘Next Blog’ – This has always been an issue in Blogger. If anyone clicks on Next Blog at the top of your blog, they could end up somewhere less than desirable within a couple of clicks. Edublogs is designed for education and there is no danger or possibility of this happening and no ‘Next Blog!’
Attractive templates - Edublogs is built on WordPress technology and has a large number of templates (over 50) to choose from for your blog. It also allows you to make certain modifications to themes such as changing the image header. It was great to be given the exact dimensions of this header as well so I didn’t have to guess the desired size the way I did in Blogger.
Great technical support – I have already posted a couple of questions to the forum and have had lightning fast replies. There is also a great blog that shows you how to do almost anything that you would need.
Ability to embed all types of code – this was the one that stopped me from making this change earlier. Edublogs did not let you embed certain types of code such as iFrame used by a lot of web 2.0 tools due to security worries. They have recently changed this policy and I can now embed almost anything that I want to. I need to be able to do this on a blog that writes about Web 2.0 technologies.
Designed for teachers – this is a blog tool specifically designed for teachers and the tools and the help are specifically molded to this purpose.
Ease of moving – I was able to migrate all of my blog posts from Blogger with a few clicks. It was a very simple process to bring my content with me.
There are a few drawbacks to using Edublogs that I feel I should point out as well if you are considering the move:
You are unable to edit the html of the templates which means that you are unable to put code from Google Analytics or other monitoring services into your template. UPDATE: Thanks to people who left comments and pointed out that you can use a built-in plugin to add Google Analytics. I still would like to be able to use other tools from sites such as MyBlogLog which do need access to the code so I’ll look forward to the addition of this feature to Edublogs.
Edublogs is seldom listed as a blogger platform when trying to set up links between your blog and other web 2.0 services. I am still trying to set up a link to my Google Docs account – I’ll let you know how that goes (and how to do it if I manage it )
Otherwise, I am very happy with my new home. The back end of the blog looks a little different to Blogger but doesn’t take too long to get the hang of. Instead of the ‘Layout’ tab in Blogger, you go to ‘Presentation’ in Edublogs. Posts are handled in two different tabs called ‘Write’ and ‘Manage’ rather than being under the one ‘Posts’ in Blogger. Basically, there are no major issues and I’d recommend the change.
After a wonderfully regenerating holiday in South East Asia, I’m back at the computer. OK – I didn’t totally get away from screen time as I had a travel blog that I kept updated while we were away but it was really good to have some ‘real life’ experiences rather than all cyber. Should you want to check out some pics, they can be found on http://flickr.com/photos/suziea
Now it is back into work and there are a number of projects this year to keep me busy. It is also really exciting that a number of the schools that I work in are trying out some of the Web 2.0 tools that I found last year. Muritai School are having a go with 21classes for two of the classrooms. This is a blogging tool that allows a central blog page for the class with individual blogs for each child behind this. The great features of this tool are that there are monitoring tools for the teacher to check the appropriateness of the content and you can do things like have post a message that appears on all the blogs or specify which blog it appears on. The blogs also interconnected in some ways which is more like a social network. Finally, I think the fact that some of the writing on an individual blog can be made private would be great so that parents can share in it but not necessarily the entire class. If I had a class, I’d like to have a go with this tool so I am living through them vicariously.
Another school is looking into using Airset, a calendaring and organisation website that I had a little play with last year. Again, I think this is a great tool so I will be looking on with interest as to how well it works for them. We have also set up blogs for each class in a couple of the schools. One thing that will hopefully help this work really well in one of the schools is that we have used just one school gmail address (using the admin email address to sign up) and created 10 blogs from the same account. This means that if a teacher leaves, the blogs and the blog URLs will stay with the school rather than littering cyberspace when that teacher leaves and never uses that blog account again. It also means that there is only one username and password to remember for all 10 blogs. I’ll let you know how this works over the course of the year.
Anyway – glad to be back and I feel that we have a lot to cover this year. I look forward to the discussions in the blogsphere. To celebrate the New Year, I have even given my blog a spruce up and a new title. Hopefully, I’ll see a lot of you again at the Blogger’s Cafe at Learning@School.
Sheryl NassbaumBeach’s commented on Twitter about the positive the impact of one 10 year old who has set up a blog called ‘25 Days to Make a Difference‘. On this blog, she outlines each day one thing she has done to make a positive difference to the world and invites readers of the blog to do the same. She is holding a competition to see who can have the biggest impact from her readership using $25 US (her monthly allowance) as they prize money. Since then, a number of people have offered to match her prize money so she has started to offer other prizes in different categories. This is a really nice idea and she has had 1000s of hits in the week since the site has been up. One of the prize categories is for the good done by a classroom so perhaps classes may want to look at it.
On this blog, I noticed that there was a link to an Odiogo version of her blog posts. This is a free tool where you can register and give your blog feed address and then Odiogo turns each post into a podcast episode. They also provide a feed for this so that people can subscribe using iTunes and then download to an MP3 player. The quality of the audio from this tool for this blog was very high. The voices sounded very natural reading the blog posts (and of course very American). You can check out the Idiogo page for this blog for yourself by clicking here.
The PlotBot website is fun, easy to use and would be a wonderful addition to any classroom writing programme. This web 2.0 tool allows you to quickly and easily write scripts and more than one person can be part of the project. Imagine planning out a story outline as a class and then the kids take turns on the computer writing sections of the script. You could then print them off and workshop them and you could easily go back on and change sections that didn’t work as well as others. The tool gives you instructions on how a script works and does all the formatting for you making it just a case of selecting whether you are adding an action or dialogue section and then typing away.
I have also used ScribeFire to complete this post. I have had this Firefox extension for quite a long time but have only just had a look at it in the last couple of days in more detail. You click on a small icon at the bottom of your browser window and it pops open with an area to type your blog entry. You can drag in items or blocks of text from the website that you are blogging about and then click publish without ever needing to actually visit your blog.
Many of the parent communities we work with are not all that familiar with technologies such as RSS. However, most people have email and will check this regularly. Nourish allows you to turn a feed (or a combination of feeds) into something that people can subscribe to by email. You can add a button to your website where people can click on and add their email addresses into to subscribe. You can also add addresses in yourself so that those people will get the email newsletter. People will be able to unsubscribe by clicking a link in their email if they don’t want to receive these emails. This would also be great for someone who wants to keep check on the activity happening in online spaces such as a school ICT lead teacher or a principal. They could combine all the feeds from the teacher blogs/ wikis and have these being sent as a digest to their email. I am going to add a button for people to subscribe to this blog very shortly!
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