Hi

Had a great time working with five teachers in Leeds today during a course on blogging and social learning networks. In all 10 new blogs in edublogs and blogger saw the light of day and we enjoyed creating voki characters, embedding video and games and exploring widgets. It was a nice surprise when we noticed Joe Dale had referred to the presentation we were following through the day in his post. For anyone beginning blogging, just a reminder - you can search this site for "blog club" entries to get instructions on the basics of blogging, from setting up to writing posts and pages and installing a couple of widgets. Don't forget there are great help videos in edublogs and plenty of tips and guidance in the dashboard area of blogger. Happy blogging...we certainly were today!

Tasks for blog club

On your marks! - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: On your marks!

Quick start guides

For a reminder for blog-clubbers I've uploaded two basic guides to using blogger and edublogs to the scribd website. Remember you can then embed documents from scribd into your blog, but I'm just inserting the links here to save space.

blogger basics:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3257831/Quick-start-guide-to-blogger

edublogs basics:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3257990/EDUBLOGS-QUICK-START-GUIDE

Introduction to Social Networking Sites

You don't fatten a pig by weighing it

So the old country saying goes... but on the other hand I am interested to see how many visits this blog gets. Therefore I installed a counter widget last week and was astounded at braincandy's popularity -as it scaled the dizzy heights of 12000 hits within a day or so. Suspicious my blog is not yet quite so well-known I have removed that widget and installed an alternative one (also from widgetbox). I look forward to more sober stats.!
Seriously, the point of all this is that I want a reliable counter for our first moblog. You can see the embryo of this blog forming at www.montpellierlive08.blogspot.com. We will be meeting in the French department within the next few days to discuss ways into this trip and its accompanying blog for year 10, and maybe setting them some research work to get them using the blog before they go. Meanwhile I have created an account and set up a Montpellier channel with gabcast. This week I will be practising creating mp3s by 'phone and hopefully having them sent directly to the trip blog so that we know what we are doing in June.

Make a your own video from digital photos

Log on to Animoto to check this out and do listen to the soundtrack - the music they provide is pretty cool. Like baking bread - it doesn't take much actual work time but does take a while to upload and "render" into a video. Free for a 30 second clip. Great for a celebration of a visit or reinforcement of a topic, you can opt for the music or upload your own audio commentary. Check this one out to see what the Sixth Form got up to in Paris.

Moblogging

Gerry and I attended a very informative and thought-provoking course on steps forward with IT systems today in Kent College, Pembury. Thanks Gerry for allowing me to post this snap remotely today (the idea was to catch him napping in a session but that never happened, despite some quite jargony stuff!) Blogging from a mobile is two clicks away once you have taken a photo, and posts go up instantly -as you'll see from the timing of the one below. Our school Sony Ericsson is going off on Geography field trips, the French trip and the Namibia trip this summer, so watch this space for more info - and please let me know if you are interested in using this tool for your department on trips out.