New blog

Julian has set up in Blogger, so another one added to our blogroll below.
http://julian-murphy.blogspot.com/

Child's play:click on the cartoon to scroll across

Blog club: Step One

This is the first in a series of posts helping you to master blogging. 20 minutes a week for four or five weeks should be enough to set up a fantastic site which you can then use easily in your department.
First decide which blog host you will use. Choose from www.blogger.com (this one is an example) or www.edublogs.org (look at my French blog at www.haythorneg@edublogs.org).
Edublogs allows you to use a number of pages, as well as reverse-chronological posting on any particular page, and functions such as getting students to subscribe by e-mail, tag-clouds (an eye-catching way of enabling people to search the site) and uploading of audio files, PowerPoints and pictures are easy. Blogger has more options for blogging on the go (maybe for you, PE?) including posting from any e-mail address and posting from mobile phones, plus it has impressive features such as slideshows of photos and using newsreels. Don't agonise too much however: they seem to expand their features all the time. Have a word with me if you need more advice.
Go to the relevant website, create an account, and follow the instructions to set up a blog (a couple of clicks will do it).
When choosing a theme (template or appearance) in edublogs, make sure you choose a three column one, as it offers you more functions ("widgets"). Please now send me a link and I'll post them here so we can share what we do as we go along.

Next week we will add pages (in edublogs) and start posting (edublogs and blogger) - if you can wait until then. Remember help is available next Friday, 1st February, at lunchtime (venue tba). Happy blogging!

One for the techies

During NCIS on Saturday the camera panned over a plaque on the office wall:
There are 10 types of people in this world:
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Ha ha.

New blog

Check out a new blog for students of Economics at http://mattbentley34.edublogs.org

Feedback from INSET

So far I've heard from 12 departments who would like to follow up on blogs and podcasting. Daniel has a date with the RE department to go through Audacity and Matt has already set up an Economics blog. Watch this space for details of bloggers' club.

Delicious!

When you come across useful websites, you can save them in a "Favourites" area for easy-clicking. "Social Bookmarking" is just as easy and much more flexible. Advantages include being able to label, or tab, and then search your lists, share them with colleagues, and access them from anywhere you have a web connection. Have a look at the video below for a clear explanation and instructions on how to get started. Once you have built up a good number of links, you can add "delicious" links to your blog, so that students can easily link to your most useful subject sites.

Scrummy social bookmarking for beginners

Labels

When you post an entry, don't forget to fill in the label line at the bottom of the entry box. This will facilitate searching your blog for particular themes. Some blog-hosts provide a "tag-cloud" function, which makes your labels, or tags appear in a "cloud" of themes in your sidebar.

Take the Tube

YouTube is not the only video-sharing site out there. Go to www.teachertube.com to search for videos illustrating issues in your subject, from erupting volcanoes and grammar presentations to synchronised swimmers demonstrating cell-division. Once you've found something helpful you can embed the video into your blog. To do this, scroll down to the bottom right of the teachertube page where you will find lists of codes to copy into various different blog types. In this case I copied the Blogger code and pasted it into the HTML tab side of a post entry. Dadah! One click on the site now and you're away.