In order to help teachers new to the medium I’ve decided that this summer’s project will be to compile a guide to running a succesful classroom blog. I’m hoping that members of the Creative Blogs Community as well as other educational bloggers will add their thoughts to a wiki I’ve set up for the purpose. I’ll edit the results into a paper and make it freely downloadable to all and sundry under a Creative Commons share and share alike license. Hopefuly it will be of use to individual teachers setting up their own blogs, or to schools wanting to run a campus project.

I would appreciate contributions to the wiki, no matter how small; please email  john at creativeict.co.uk for a password.

At the moment it’s a blank canvas, but I’ll start adding structure over the next few days.

Creative ICT’s Zoho wiki

Thanks,

John

The simple fact is that, unless specifically granted, you do not have permission to reproduce images (or sound files, or video etc) from someone’s website. Period.

Fortunately, there are many people using the web nowadays who are happy to share their work and allow people to copy, re-use and even adapt original pieces of media. An organisation has grown around this trend which makes it easy for people to identify work that they can use safely. This is Creative Commons.

The volume of work now licensed under Creative Commons is such that it is now possible to use certain web tools to identify images and sounds so licensed. One such tool is the image search engine, Compfight. Compfight is a search tool that trawls the well known image hosting service, Flickr. First thing to note, Flickr is sometimes blocked by LA filters - test it in your school to see.

Using Compfight

1. Make sure the safe search tag is set to “on”
2. Set the Creative Commons tag to “All” - finds all images licensed under the various Creative Commons attributions
3. Set the “Seek Original” tag to “Off”
4. Enter your search term

Examples:

“romans” found about 250 usable images

“Kandinsky” found about 60 images

“Mountain” found thousands of images

In other words, you should be able to find some usable images for any curriculum project you care to mention. Once you’ve spotted an image you like, click on it to bring up the Flickr page containing that image. Click on the small “All sizes” button at the top left hand corner of the image and select the size image you wish to download to your pc. Once downloaded, you can then upload your image to your blog post via the media uploader.

Once uploaded, you usually still need to attribute your source, as most Creative Commons licenses require you to do this (see John Johnston’s search tool below).

Educating staff and children alike about Creative Commons and the use of tools such as Compfight is good practice and helps engender a responsible attitude towards the internet.

Other Creative Commons Search Tools

Besides Compfight, there are a number of other Creative Commons search tools - all seem to be based on Flickr - will be an issue if Flickr is blocked in your school!

Flickr Storm: Click on the “advanced” tab to search for Creative Commons only

FlickrCC: Has the advantage of giving you the Creative Commons attribution and the URL of the image, so need to go to Flickr to embed it.

John Johnston: A neat Flickr mashup from a colleague that adds the Creative Commons license into the embed code. Search, click on the image you want, copy the embed code and paste it into your blog on the html tab. Voila!

Photo by Waka Jawaka
Attribution License

The first thing I would say is that none of the following points are likely to persuade anyone unless you are willing to give it a go. The actual mechanicals of getting a piece of writing published on a blog are ridiculously simple, and, like all software, you do need to spend a short period of time familiarising yourself with the basic features of your chosen blog platform (in the case of Creativeblogs, it’s Worpress MU). Once you are happy with the basic wordprocessor controls of your class blog you are ready to start blogging with your class - and remember I’m trying to show you how you can do this without adding to your workload.

Shared Writing

Wherever possible, use your blog to work on shared writing sessions with your class. You are planning to do a shared write anyway, so do it on your blog. And, by doing it on the blog you can get extra benefits:

• A new published piece of work with no extra effort;
• Go back to it in the future and edit or add to it;
• It’s online for a later session when your class might be working on laptops or in an ICT suite;
• Structure a homework task around the post by asking children to comment at home. Perhaps by writing the next paragraph of the story; giving their point-of-view; writing their own verse or poem etc;
• By “tagging” each shared write according to its genre (science-fiction, autobiography, argument, chronological report etc) you can quickly build up an index of searchable resources to use in future.

What have we learned this week?

Once a week get a small group of children (possibly with a TA) to reflect on the week’s work and what they have learned. They can also mention any special projects, who has had class rewards etc. Again, this gives other children the opportunity to respond, and it’s amazing how often children will visit a class blog and add a comment on how much they have enjoyed a particular activity.

Put homework on your blog

The preparation and marking of homework can be really tedious and time consuming, so try and make it fun and interactive by using your class blog. Posting videos from Teachertube is incredibly quick and easy (instructions here) and adding links to educational websites such as the lovely Tutpup is also really simple. Tutpup has the added benefit of being a fun and competitive way to learn tables and spelling while giving you, the teacher simple feedback to see who is actually having a go. Don’t forgot to also structure homework tasks around your shared writes as mentioned above.

The basic principle is to find tasks that you have to do anyway and see if you can think of a constructive way you can do this via a class blog. The easiest way of doing this is to structure tasks around the shared write/pupils feedback via a comment approach which can work for loads of different contexts, not just literacy.

Remember, blogging is a habit: once you do it regularly enough it becomes second nature. With a little bit of effort in getting to know how to publish stuff on your blog you will be very surprised how quick and easy it becomes I’m reminded a little when interactive whiteboards were introduced - a lot of teachers felt threatened and were way outside of their comfort zones with all this new hardware in their classroom. Nowadays I’m really surprised when I go into a classroom and I don’t find a whiteboard in it. I’d like to think that it could be the same with class blogs, after all, what better way is there to demonstrate the excellence that goes on in your classroom.

Special Offer on Creativeblogs.net

Until the end of the summer term schools can order a multi-userblogsite from Creativeblogs.net and get their training half-price (£250 instead of £500). Simply contact  john at creativeict.co.uk for more details.

Schools with blogs powered by Creativeblogs.net

Click on the tags to find a link to their blogsite.

This timeline is an automatic creation using feeds from this blog, and from Twitter (I’m HGJohn on Twitter if you want to follow me). I did this just to show how easy it is to display a timeline, however Dipity Timeline’s real worth is as a curriculum tool where a group of children might research and edit a timeline on whatever topic they might be doing - the timeline displayed in the blog post will grow as the children add to their work.

<a href=”schoolwebaddress“>Title of link</a>

The “schoolwebaddress” is the full URL, including the http://, and the “Title of link” is whatever you want to display in the tag.

As well as adding links to the tag, you can also add images. To link to an image, the image must first be hosted online somewhere e.g. Photobucket, Flickr or Phanfare, to name but three photo hosting services (check to see if any are blocked in school). Once you’ve got the image hosted online, you simply need to find the URL for that image and embed it into the Quikmaps tag using the following form:

<img src=”imageurl“>

Again, “imageurl” includes the http://. Note that it is important to save the image on your chosen service in the size you wish it to display on your Quikmap (usually a thumbnail size image is best).

Possible uses for Quikmaps in the classroom:

• Practically every Geography lesson you can think of;
• Locating places for history lessons;
• A litter survey of your school grounds (zoom in really close and click on satellite view, then add tags for where you found litter);
• Residential courses - plotting routes of walks, nature surveys etc;
• Plotting routes to school of Walking Buses;
• Locating amenities in your community (go on a community walk with a digi camera and add the photo tags to a Quikmap;
• The list is endless…

]]> http://creativeblogs.net/blog/2008/05/17/maps/feed/ http://creativeblogs.net/blog/2008/03/26/creative-icts-products-and-services-brochure/ http://creativeblogs.net/blog/2008/03/26/creative-icts-products-and-services-brochure/#comments Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:13:34 +0000 John Sutton http://creativeblogs.net/blog/2008/03/26/creative-icts-products-and-services-brochure/ I’m now starting my 4th year as an independent ICT consultant. It’s about time I pulled everything I do into one place, so this presentation is a summary of all the products and services I offer. Please take a few moments to flick through it, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like more information about anything mentioned.