blogpilot

An interesting articles on US Edtech K-12 website.

Find out where in the world your blog readers are.

Register with:

http://www.clustrmaps.com

Code is provided by them which can be cut and pasted as link on your blog.

Learnerblogs have now added a plugin called WP slimstats. This adds an option to the dashboard which allows you to see who has viewed your blog and where they are viewing from.

Programme on Teacher’s TV about blogging in the classroom.

Click here

This is now a separate page. Follow the light grey text link above.

After a couple discussion a few futher ideas have come up.

• Using the Blog for writing two sides of a discussion / argument. It would make sense to use the category facility for this so the author can indicate whether they are pro or anti etc
• Working with other schools. If another school is set up in the same way on learnerblogs their users can be set up on the blog so they are allowed to post comments. This will maintain some of the security but also allow interaction between groups.

Deepcar. Working with the same class of children. Class continued their spreadsheet work. One PC was left logged into the Blog and the kids were given opportunity to post messages. Children were asked to use their first name and surname initial only as the blog is visible to the public.

Deepcar kids introduced to the Blog set up for them. The lesson was focused on spreadsheets and a few of the class were given a chance to post a message about the activity they were doing. One PC was logged into the blog ready to post and kids took to posting very easily.

Posting to a page in the wordpress blog system
Users can write pages BUT pages work outside of the chronological order of the blog. Pupils will therefore mainly post directly to the blog. Pages may be used for another purpose eg a project or activity write up.

Adding pictures
Pictures are uploaded and then dragged to the editor window.

Options and Settings
Discussion options – untick usual setting for article
Removed unneeded links
Created a link on the blogroll to allow pupils to post more easily. URL copied from post option and added as a link.

Categories
Categories have been created for various subjects and ‘emotions’ eg positive and negative. When pupils post to the blog they tick the relevant categories. The blog can then be filtered by category.

Attributing Posts
Because pupils are all logging on as the same user to post entries there isn’t an automatic way to know who has posted what. Pupils will be asked to inital their entries in the main title.

Two users have been created for each blog. There is an admin user which allows full access to the system. There is an author user which the pupils will use to post entries to the blog.