Aug

31

New Year, New Bloggers

August 31, 2010 | Blogging at School  |  Leave a Comment

I’d like to welcome some new schools to Creative Blogs for the Autumn term. It seems to me, from my very small and blinkered view of the schools market, that at last schools are beginning to understand the power of blogs as a tool for learning. In 2010 I have found that I no longer have to explain quite so often what a blog is, and more and more teachers have seen great examples of blogsites already. They have used these as a spur to explore setting up their own blog projects.

Some of the really active bloggers on Creative Blogs include:

I’m incredibly proud to host these blogs as well as all the other schools who have chosen Creative Blogs as their Worpdpress blog platform. To explore the community, use the map below to find links to all the schools that I blog with.

A number of schools have been set up towards the end of the summer term and I’m hoping that they take inspiration from some of the bloggers above and, in turn, develop their own teams of enthusiastic bloggers (teachers and children). Please checkout their sites and leave comments to set them on their way!

The new schools include:

If you are a teacher that wants to explore the power of blogging with your class, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I am happy to set up blogs for teachers or classes for free. If you want a full multi-user WordPress platform for your school, details can be found here.

To contact me, I am HGJohn on Twitter, or via email: john(at)creativeict.co.uk (the @ sign replaced to avoid spam)

Aug

20

Setting up your blogsite for a new school year

August 20, 2010 | Archiving Blogs, Blogging at School, Setup, Wordpress  |  Leave a Comment

As we look forward to new classes and new challenges every September, we also need to give our school blogsites a shake up, or at very least, review what’s worked and what’s not, clean up the links in the sidebars, remove unwanted widgets etc. and, most importantly, sort out the class blogs.

Options for class blogs

Do nothing, roll on as before. This is obviously the easy option and involves the least work. Perhaps give your class blog a fresh theme and update the links and widgets. This might work if your blogs are simply year group blogs, i.e. year1, year2, year3 etc. However, unless you are really good at organising content on your blog, it will become harder and harder to find content as your blog gets bigger and bigger.
Delete old content and start afresh. This is another easy option to take, but is my least favoured as it destroys all the work that your class has lovingly crafted throughout the school year, and when, with a little more effort, your blog can be kept online for posterity, why would you press the destruct button? If you insist, simply go to Posts in the Dashboard sidebar then follow this diagram below. Of course, for a real “year zero” option, you can simply delete the blogs from the blog list.


Create new blogs. For most, this is the default option, especially if class names change. If class names remain the same, then consider instigating a blog name protocol that everyone understands such as y12010, y22010, y32010 etc. with the date referring to the start of that class’ school year.  Note: you cannot simply rename existing blogs as this will destroy the link structure of the blog. If you insist on having your blog with the same name as a previous year, then you can always export all the content from your blog and import it into an archive blog set up for this purpose (detailed notes here).

Once you have set up the new blogs (or got the school’s blog administrator to do it for you) you need to delete the links for the old class blogs blogs from the school’s homepage and replace them with links to the new class blogs. The only question left is what to do with the old class blogs.

Archiving Old Blogs

It’s amazing how many old pupils like to return to their school blogsite and look at what they did and it’s simple to set up an archive for old class blogs. On the school home blog set up a new page (Dashboard: Pages > Add New) called “Blog Archive” or similar and on that page add the links to all the old class blogs organised in calendar years. That’s it. For an example of this in practice, visit Plymouth Grove’s blogsite and click on “Blog Archive” at the top.

There is one other thing that you need to do on the old blogs, and that is to disable comments. This prevents spam and unwanted comments as well as removing the need to check on these blogs. So for each old class blog, go to that blog’s dashboard the Settings > Discussion then change the relevant settings as illustrated (click on the illustration to enlarge).

Jul

26

Blogtheworldcup – a huge success

July 26, 2010 | Blogtheworldcup, Buddypress  |  Leave a Comment

This blog has been quiet lately, for two reasons: firstly, I have moved house and BT in their wisdom are taking rather a long time to get me connected to broadband;  secondly, I have been running a rather exciting project called Blogtheworldcup. It’s a collection of 32 blogs representing the 32 countries that took part, each blog being maintained by a class of children with their teacher.

To date the site has had over half a million hits (and it was only live 1 week before the Cup started) and has about 650 members blogging, commenting and interacting. What’s different about this site is that although it is based on WordPress, like all my school sites, it has the Buddypress plugin installed. This turns the site into something more akin to Facebook with users having the ability to update their own profile; “like” the posts of others; use the Twitter @ convention to send public messages; make forum posts and much more, all withinthe context of a techer moderated platform.

Here’s what some of those involved in the project thought:

Peter Ford, site creator

David Mitchell, deputy head at Heathfield CPS, Bolton

Claire Cheesman, teacher, Summerland Primary, Auckland NZ

Simon Widdowson, teacher, Porchester Junior School, Nottingham

It has been a privilege to have been involved in this project from its inception and watching what the teachers and children did with their blogs. Here’s to the success of Blogtheolympics.net, it’s going to be quite a ride.

Any Creative Blogs schools interested in adding Buddypress to their sites, please get in touch to discuss it.

Jun

24

Adding a linked image to a sidebar

June 24, 2010 | Images, widgets  |  Leave a Comment

Adding a linked image into a sidebar widget:

Step 1: Upload an image using the media uploader (Media > Add New) Make sure that the image is no more than 200 pixels wide BEFORE you upload it.

Step 2: Copy the file URL of the image you have just uploaded.

Step 3: Go to Appearance > Widgets and drag a text widget into the sidebar

Step 4: In the box type the following html:

<p align=”center”><a href=”ADD YOUR LINK HERE“><img src=”ADD THE LINK TO THE IMAGE FILE HERE“></a></p>

Replace the bits in capitals with a link to your school website (or wherever) and the link to the image file. Now save.

Once you’ve done this you’ll have a linked image in your sidebar, like this one: http://newzealand.blogtheworldcup.net/

Jun

6

The Googlemail Plus Trick

June 6, 2010 | Google Docs  |  Leave a Comment

Signing up for web services to use with your class can be a bit of a problem with some services that require individual web addresses  and don’t allow multiple logins, especially if you don’t have individual email addresses for your class members. Fortunately there exists a loophole in Googlemail (Gmail) that allows you to create multiple email addresses that resolve to the same address. In other words, you can give all the children in your class an individual email addresses that use a single email address to send and receive all messages. This makes the management of email extremely simple.

How does it work?

Suppose I have a Googlemail account called johnsyear4class@googlemail.com. By adding a + (plus) sign and a name I can have multiple email addresses that use the same account. For example:

johnsyear4class+james@googlemail.com

johnsyear4class+hannah@googlemail.com

johnsyear4class+imran@googlemail.com

All these different email addresses will use johnsyear4class@googlemail.com to send and receive mail.

It’s a really simple trick that makes the managing of class email really simple.

To sign up for a Googlemail or Gmail account, visit http://mail.google.com

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