Twitter, if you’ve not already encountered it, is a service worth knowing about. It’s like really simple blogging, but, with each post limited to 140 characters, is used more for conversational updates. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.
It’s used by a wide range of people and organisations, from 10 Downing Street to Stephen Fry to quite a few of the online education community. How might schools use it? Here are some possibilities:
- Use text message Twitter updates to post on-the-spot updates from school trips or visits
- Display the Twitter updates in the sidebar of the school or class blog
- Follow a topical Twitterer - such as Barack Obama - to get news stories faster than radio or TV
Now you can display your latest Twitter updates (or anyone else’s) using a widget on your edubuzz WordPress blog using Rick’s Twitter for WordPress plugin. Just activate the plugin and configure your Twitter widget(s).
That 5-minute Glow Guide was, er, not quite a full 5 minute’s worth. I guess the upload had got interrupted, so the screencast video cut out before the end. It works now, so there’s no need to lose sleep worrying if it all ended happily. (Flash movie, 14MB)
This is a very quick tour to give you some idea of what Glow is currently like.
If you’d like to get started, please contact David Gilmour
Including a photo gallery in your posts or pages is now a whole lot easier. And here’s what they look like:
This big improvement is a built-in feature of the current WordPress MU software. It offers great potential for school use:
- It provides really good support for commenting on individual images, not just one the post.
- It allows photos to be displayed with captions.
Go and take a look at the original post on the King’s Meadow site to see it in action.
It’s also the ideal way to show off collections of photos of paintings or other activities where your audience might still want to have a good look at an individual photo, and not watch it quickly change into another one as part of a slideshow!
To use it, just upload a set of images in the usual way. Just don’t hit “Insert in Post” while you’re working with the individual images, use Insert Gallery instead. You’ll just see the word Gallery in square brackets, but the image gallery will displayed when the post or page is visited.
We’ve said before that edubuzz.org visits were hitting over 10,000 per day during May, but how busy is it in terms of contributions?
To keep an eye on that we’ve added the Blog Activity plugin from WPMU DEV Premium. It hasn’t been running for a full month yet, but a random check today showed that in the last week there were over 1000 contributions: 504 posts and 499 comments.
This balance between posts and comments is a good indication - if any were needed - of the changing times for education web sites.
Thanks to Lynne Lewis, Athelstaneford Primary students now have their own copy of the Glow Games.
If you’d like to add them to your eduBuzz site, you’ll find instructions below.
If you’ve an eduBuzz blog, you’ll have had to avoid using the default “Flash uploader”, which was generating an “HTTP Error” message: that’s now sorted.
We believe the fault’s now fixed (a site-wide WordPress plugin needed to be upgraded). Feedback welcome - please leave a comment.
With interest in Glow increasing rapidly around Scotland, these Glow Games have been let loose to help get people talking - and, of course, help with learning too.
Once you get your Glow login, you’ll find they’re in there too - with some advantages.
If you’ve an edubuzz blog, why not embed the games in a post or page? Enjoy. Continue reading ‘Light Up Your Blog With Glow Games’
All East Lothian staff with either school or council email addresses can now use “Create new blog“.
After a spate of spam blogs, this option was temporarily restricted. Before long, usage took off and we had to keep the restriction in place to avoid server overload. Capacity has now been increased, and restrictions partially lifted. If you’re East Lothian staff, you can now create as many edubuzz blogs as you want. What are you waiting for?
French video sharing site Dailymotion.com offers a wide range of entertaining French-language videos which can help make language learning fun. And if you’ve an edubuzz blog, you can easily embed them in your posts. Here’s how to do it:
- Click “Menu” in the bottom right of the video, then choose “URL and embed code”
- Under the Embed box, click “Copy code”.
- In your WordPress blog’s editor, click the yellow A (for Anarchy) toolbar button.
- Paste the Embed code into the box that pops up. (You’ll notice the box says “For DAILYMOTION and BREAK videos and iTUNES IMIXES just copy and paste the code from their embeddable players.)
Thanks are due to Jackie Swan for the idea. And here’s the end result, using one of Dailymotion’s most popular recent videos:
