Here’s a nice little video from commoncraft.com for Foundations level students to teach them some basic techniques regarding how to limit search engine results by enclosing quotation marks around two or more words or using the minus sign to exclude certain results.
Here is the embed code if you’d like to share it. Highlight all the text in the form box below and copy to share.
HTML Editors do not activate within Blackboard using Vista. There are many reasons why the Editor might not be working (Click here to see a list of all possible causes and their solutions), however the most common reasons for the HTML editor not working are the following:
1. It will not work in Firefox 3 – Encourage all students to post using Internet Explorer 7 to avoid Firefox compatibility issues.
2. You need to enable the Java add-ons
1. Open Internet Explorer 7.
Click on Tools > Manage Add-ons > Enable or Disable Add-ons.
2. On the manage Add-ons screen, check to see if there is an Add-on named “Sun Java Console”.
a) If this section can be found, then Java is on your computer
b) If there was no ‘Java’ section in the advanced options, then click here to download correct Java version.
3. Look to see if Java Console is disabled > If disabled, click Enable radio button > Click OK button
4. Close Internet Explorer, then re-open it to ensure the Add-on software is properly configured.
There are two versions of Wordpress Blogs that an educator can use: A free WordPress.com hosted blog, or a server-side blog (used by professional bloggers) that uses its own domain name. Each type requires a different set of set-up instructions and skills.
If you’re creating your first blog and don’t have a great deal of technical expertise, then it’s best to set one up through the hosted blog service Wordpress.com. Using this free service, you can have your blog in a ready-to-use state within 15 minutes.
To accomplish this you must first set up an account. Click on this online article for detailed instructions on how this is easily done.
Other popular hosted blogging platforms include Blogger, Typepad and Vox.
Wordpress.com essentially “hosts” your blog at their domain. They make creating a blog easy by providing well-designed templates, a choice of presentation designs (known as Themes), a web address and rich text editors that allow you to create posts without any special technical knowledge.
However, there are some cons to using a WordPress.com’s hosted blog:
1. Unlike their server-side counterparts, a hosted blog doesn’t allow you to play around with it’s design templates. If you have a great deal of technical expertise and would like total control of your blog’s look, you may feel limited by a hosted blog.
2. WordPress.com incorporates its host name into your blog’s URL address (i.e. www.yourblogname.wordpress.com).
3. You don’t have access to site folders on this blog site, meaning you can’t FTP media or webpages, nor download or upload them from your hard drive.
To accomplish this requires several things:
a) A registered domain name
b) A web host (preferably one that offers WordPress as an install option (e.g. Plesk), allowing WordPress to be installed in a few clicks, and maybe typing in a password and an email address for the account. Very simple.
c) An FTP application. I recommend the free Filezilla for FTP, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Although requiring a great deal more technical expertise and time, a server-side blog offers you total control over your blog. More importantly, you will always have the files of content contained within your blog - allowing you to archive them for prospertity or transfer them to another blog or other web hosting service.
Read this article for a detailed description of how to set up a server-side WordPress blog .
A question that is often asked by faculty deciding to use Web 2.0 media in their classrooms is “What is the difference between a Wiki and a Blog?” The following quote taken from a blog posting attempts to answer this question (click here to read posting in full) :
Within the classroom, the open style of a wiki can be useful for group projects, while a blog may aid in brainstorming or generating discussion. Also, a combination of the two may best suit educational purposes. Because a wiki can limit which users can login and edit the content, facilitator control can virtually be the same as a blog, where comments and posts can be pre-screened.
The main difference, then, between a wiki and a blog becomes the layout and organization of information. A wiki becomes a continually modifiable easy-access web page, while a blog’s journalistic style catalogs and dates content so readers can see the interchange of ideas related to the blog topic in question.
Although easy to do, adding a video to a 2.6 or above version WordPress blog is hardly intuitive, so I have included this video to explain.
The important thing to remember is that the embed code found on the YouTube site where the video is hosted must be placed into the HTML editor, and not in the Visual editor. The results of this are demonstrated below:
<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/9TQmNNN-8sk&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0×234900&color2=0×4e9e00″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/9TQmNNN-8sk&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0×234900&color2=0×4e9e00″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
From The National.
Here is a very nice article by Chris Brogan about :
This would make an excellent article to use in a classroom as a springboard to discussing ground rules for using social media platforms in an educational setting, and also for identifying behaviors considered annoying or unacceptable in the wider digital community.
Here’s a great little article about how blogging is beginning to gain serious currency in the educational field, because it incorporates a number of new literacies necessary to successfully exploit the rapidly changing information and communication technologies in our world. Read the full article here.
However, the writer warns that teachers must first learn to use blogs throughout their curriculum to foster these new literacies. For example,
The author goes on to provide a list of reasons regarding why blogging is educationally sound for teaching students:
* Blogs provide a space for sharing opinions and learning in order to grow communities of discourse and knowledge — a space where students and teachers can learn from each other.
* Blogs help learners to see knowledge as interconnected as opposed to a set of discrete facts.
* Blogs can give students a totally new perspective on the meaning of voice. As students explore their own learning and thinking and their distinctive voices emerge. Student voices are essential to the conversations we need to have about learning.
* Blogs foster ownership and choice. They help lead us away from students trying to find what the teacher wants in terms of an answer.
* The worldwide audience provides recognition for students that can be quite profound. Students feel more compelled to write when they believe many others may read and respond. It gives them motivation to excel. Students need to be taught skills to foster a contributing audience on their blog.
* The archive feature of blogging records ongoing learning. It facilitates reflection and evaluation. One student told me that he could easily find his thoughts on a matter and he could see how his thinking had changed and why.
* The opportunity for collective and collaborative learning is enormous. Students have the opportunity to read their classmates’ blogs and those of others. This is not possible in a regular classroom setting.
* Blogging provides the possibility of connecting with experts on the topic students are writing.
* The interactive nature of blogging creates enthusiasm for writing and communication.
* Blogging engages students in conversation and learning.
* Blogging encourages global conversations about learning–conversations not previously possible in our classrooms.
* Blogging provides the opportunity for our students to learn to write for life-long learning.
* Blogging affords us the opportunity to teach responsible public writing. Students can learn about the power of the published word and the responsibilities involved with public writing.
Here’s a nice little article from Lifehacker, outlining some of the more advanced, and often overlooked, features of OneNote. Click here to read the full article. For example:
Here’s a neat solution, prompted by a question from Marlene of the Business Department. How can we get a PowerPoint displayed on a Promethean board/ActivStudio flipchart. The first option was to open a new flipchart, right click on the flipchart and choose ‘insert’. You can then insert your PowerPoint as text or a file.
However, Padraig, on the ball as ever, spotted the ‘convert to PowerPoint’ option in the ActivStudio toolbox. Just browse to your Power Point file and it will be converted with one PowerPoint slide being converted to one page of the flipchart. You can then annotate on top of the slides and export the completed file when you’re finished.
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