Using ICT in Further Education

WordPress Training provide excellent video tutorials covering all aspects of using Wordpress (version 2.5) including installing and upgrading.

Their hope is that WordPress Training will “appeal to both novice and experienced WordPress users. Whether you’re looking for a comprehensive overview of the entire WordPress system, or simple insight into a single administrative page“.

A very useful site. Hopefully, WordPress Training will be adding/amending videos to cover any new aspects associated with the new WordPress 2.7 version released this month!!

Posterous is a super fast way to create and maintain a blog using email.  Came across this thanks to Horst Sievert.

The subject line of your email becomes the blog post title with the message text becoming the post text. But, it doesn’t stop there as Posterous lets your attach files (photos, MP3’s, documents, video), which are also placed in the body of your post.

If you attach more than one photo in the same message, Posterous automatically creates a very nice looking image gallery.

You can also insert URLs into your email message and these are added to your post as links, with a video link being converted to an embedded player. An RSS feed is included as standard. The only down side is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to tag posts.

It really couldn’t be easier. As I use email quite a bit I decided to set up a college blog with Posterous to use for posting notices for my classes during the year. The idea being that the students will add the RSS feed to their college personalised start page and can keep track of notices whenever they sign in.

Being a blog, it will also allow students to post comments about a notice if they have any queries or questions!

Be warned, it will probably be BLOCKED on your network – it is on ours!!! Apparently, Posterus is a no go area

But, all is not lost because Posterus also lets you autopost, via email, to some of your other services – blogs, twitter and flickr. So, you could set up a new edublogs blog, not blocked, which will receive all the ’email’ posts.

While this will work for text, urls and some ‘non blocked’ video links it is not the complete solution as the other content hosted on Posterus (images, audio) is still blocked and will not show up on the student network!

A much better solution is to see if your ‘education network manager’ will unblock your individual posterous blog. I recently asked for three of my blocked blogs to be unblocked and they all were

Thanks NCTE.

Previously, I would have sent notices directly to the students’ email addresses but I am interested in seeing if the whole RSS setup and commenting feature will work better. 

Apture provides “the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences“.

With Apture, it is really easy to add images, videos, audio files and wikipedia articles to your page.

Allow your readers/students to engage with all this multimedia without having to leave your webpage.

Apture does indeed “turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience“. Just have a look at the next section, about Dublin, which contains links to all four types of media mentioned. First found reference to Apture on Kathy’s blog.

Dublin or Baile Átha Cliath is the capital of Ireland and is situated on the East coast.

The city has a world-famous literary history, having produced many prominent literary figures, including Nobel laureates William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett plus Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift all come from Dublin. The city is also home to the creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker.

Did you ever wish you could have a widget for your own Website or Blog??

Well now you can!

Sign up with Widgetbox and you can create your own widget or blidget, as it is known there, in three easy steps.

No programming or technical knowledge needed. You can instantly turn your site or blog into a widget and share it with the Widgetsphere.

Once created, the widget can be published in the Widgetbox gallery so that others can find and use the widget on their own sites.

Here’s one I created for the International Edubloggers Directory site.

Click on the picture to take you to the widget where you can edit it and get the code!

And if that was just too easy, then try out their recently released App Accelerator and turn your newly created widget into an app!

Yes it works – the International Edubloggers Directory widget is now available for Facebook!

It is a good idea to get into the habit of backing up your blogs – just as you do with all your other digital work!

There is a built in backup facility in Edublogs and Wordpress. Simply select Manage, Export, Download Export File. On downloading, an XML file is created and can be saved to your computer.

This file contains your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories. Importantly, once you’ve saved this file, you can then use the ‘Import’ function to bring back the blog – should disaster strike!

Unfortunately, no automatic backup in Blogger but Blogger Backup is a handy utility that enables you to back up all your Blogger posts and comments to your local hard drive.

Of course, Blogger Backup also enables you to restore your posts should it become necessary. Thanks Amit for recommending this software.

Do you need a mobile version of your blog or website? If so, check out MoFuse.

With MoFuse you can “expand your readership by offering your blog on the go“.

Once setup, you can visit your blog or website by using your mobile phone. Your MoFuse site is specifically designed for mobile screens of 3″ or less.

Registration and setup is really easy and you can be ‘mobile’ literally within minutes. It works like a treat as you can see from the accompanying picture!

Your MoFuse site address takes the form of -http://yourname.mofuse.mobi/-. You can also add a nice graphic link on your blog.

Spotted this on Inge’s blog, which has lots of interesting information about mobile elearning. Thanks Inge!

D-Day approaches for the student edubloggers at School 2.0.

Concerned that “adults and teachers talk about education and students, but rarely invite students into these discussions“, School 2.0 is set to do something about it.

School 2.0 promises to feature “content written by both staff writers and guest contributors” and to provide “an authentic student voice upon education“.

Definitely one to watch!

This series will cover some very useful FREE online tools and resources. No better place to start than with Edublogs itself – the host of this blog! This is a fantastic resource which is being continually updated and improved upon. Edublogs 2.0 has just been released! It is easy and fun to use.

There is a wide selection of templates available as well as many widgets. The absence of advertising leads to a very professional look. I would highly recommend it for any new educational bloggers!