Edublogs Tutorials

If you’re a company or an organisation, group of folks spread over the globe or a family, you might want to be able to schedule something that fits all your calendars.  Doing this by email or phone takes ages and often doesn’t get everyone’s approval.

How about using ScheduleOnce

It’s free and requires not registration, takes up only a few Kb and integrates directly with Google calendars

Well, EB Tutorials has been up and running for a couple of years and has recently reached 50,000 visitors

Pretty interesting for a site that was set up to record my rambling journey through the developing platform and the addition of third party apps and podcasting

I have just found Storybird via Twitter thanks to @dogtrax

What a great site for storytelling.  Great illustrations and very simple interface make this a must use for creativity.  You can also ask others to collaborate in putting your story together.  I shall be asking my G’daughter (8 years old) to contribute and collaborate with me.

Do check it out, I think you’ll find it most engaging

I haven’t really looked into the Edublogs platform for a little while after the fuss around in-post Google ads.  It’s really heartening to see that James and his team have taken note of the community opposition to these ads and has changed things round.

As well as changing the appearance of the dashboard, which is great, incidentally, he has limited his ads to archived posts, where you are shown the EB Campus invite for multiple accounts.  This is much more in line with the educational nature of this platform and I think it’s fine.

I hope others feel the same way and have continued to use the EB platform for their blogging needs.  I have recently started a new EB personal site and I really liked the process as it was all so familiar to use.

All I hope is that the current revenue streams are sufficient for him to continue to offer a great user platform and a simple yet sophisticated blogging experience.

It would be great to hear others’ views, so please use the comment function

If you like the idea of a Clustrmap but would like to take it one step further, you could have a whos.amung.us live map. The visitors actually on the site show up as flashing points and this is a great motivator for students who want to see who is looking and from where. Click on the ‘Map widget’ tab to choose your map

As you may have gathered, there are now adverts showing up in your posts, just when you thought your Edublogs site was completely free and school friendly.  At $3500 a month for hosting and bandwidth, I think James had to take some action, but not sure if this is the only way to go.

There are lots of views on this and if you’d like to take a look, go to the two forum areas

on ads

contentlink ads

and perhaps, you’d like to add your comment there or here

This is a test post for using Google docs to publish to Edublogs

See post Setting up Google docs to edit and publish your posts

An application for this is multiple posts to a class blog from different students and locations.  The Google account has an age limit of 14 I think so some limitations here

Hi fellow Edubloggers – did you notice that there’s new functions in your toolbar.  Just click the kitchen sink icon on the far right of your write toolbar

Great stuff James – we can now choose different font sizes, embed media, undo, add custom characters etc

Have fun

Thanks to Glassbeed via twitter

This PhotoFunia looks great for adding effects to your pics – I think the kids will love it

This took me a few minutes to work out but is basically quite simple

1 Get a free Flickr account
2 You need a phone (or pc) with email facility
3 Sign into your Flickr account
4 Go to http://www.flickr.com/tools/mobile/
5 Under ‘Tips & Tricks for Uploading’ click on ‘upload by email’
6 Your account will now be given an email address to send your photos
7 Under this is a place to add a tag to a specific set – this tag can then be used to select all those photos you send and embed them in a slideshow. Save this setting
8 Save this as a contact on your phone under ‘Flickr’
9 Take a photo
10 Choose to send it by email
11 Add a comment in the body of the text message – this will be a descriptor for the photo when uploaded
12 Send
13 In Flickr, search the tag you added
14 this will now select all those uploaded pics
15 If you want to embed them in a blog etc, just choose share and copy the code
16 Paste this into your blog/website as html
17 Voila

With a focus on “Remixing Library Collections for Digital Youth”

This summit is aimed at bringing together publishers, authors, technology leaders, editors, librarians, other educators to explore where content is headed and how we can take advantage of this dynamic world to fully engage both students and teachers.

Since the change (I call it demise) of Springdoo – now called Bedroom tv! I’d like to suggest the simplest podcasting tool ever.

Vocaroo needs no sign up – just use it.  You can record a podcast (voicemail) and then email it or post it online using an embed code or an email link

Link to the file

Well done Vocaroo

Thanks to Joe Dale for the tip

If your school posts its dates onto a Google calendar and you happen to keep your information on Google too, you might want to use the merge facility to add the school’s dates to your own.
It really seems to be very simple.

• Just open up the school calendar
• In the bottom RH corner, there is a Google Calendar logo with a + sign
• Click on the + sign
• This will load up your Google calendar and ask you if you would like to import the calendar
• Agree to this and you have successfully merged them

I hope this is useful

BTW – I haven’t managed to find and undo functionm for this – perhaps someone can help

Searchme stacks is a great tool for sharing and showing resources, including web pages and video

Take a look at the video

If you want to sign up your students for a web 2.0 application and this requires an email account, simply use your free gmail account

You can register different unique account names numerous times using your own e-mail address by doing this:

emailaddress+1@gmail.com
emailaddress+2@gmail.com
emailaddress+3@gmail.com
emailaddress+4@gmail.com
emailaddress+5@gmail.com

Carey Pohanka suggested that you could use the student’s name instead of a number, and then you won’t have any problems identifying them

emailaddress+student name@gmail.com

I didn’t know that trick, many thanks

All activity the websites under these accounts will be sent to your original, derivative e-mail (i.e. emailaddress@gmail.com). This way, you’ll be able to give each student a unique application account, while also being able to monitor their account’s activity.

Thanks to Jane Knight for collating and producing this list. You might want to to check out if there are new ones you’ve perhaps missed

Google has many tools which are not readily seen by all of us, perhaps they pop up when least expected. This one came up in the K-12 online conference and although I’d heard about them, I’d not really made the connection – are you like that too?

So, if you want to get some opinions easily, then just use Google Forms – you can get the analytics when the form returns start coming in.

1. sign up for a free Google account
2. go to “My account”
3. choose “docs”
4. click on “new” menu then “form”
5. start filling in your requirements

you can have a whole variety of answer formats, from multiple choice to checkboxes

Check out the K-12 feedback form for a good example

What a great video this is – I highly recommend it to those trying to engage others in a discussion on why to use web2.0 tools in the classroom or for CPD