A Simple Blog » Training

Keep an Eye on your Favourite Blogs

stephaniebeard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:24:49 +0000

If Blogs are to be effective they should be regularly updated, but going to each individual blog to check for updated information could take a lot of precious time. (Something that is in short supply). This is where aggregators come in useful, as you can set these to keep an ‘electronic eye’ on your chosen blogs, and they will alert you if there are any new posts, making it very quick to scan through to see if anything that interests you has been added.

There are a number of these aggregators available. I currently use ‘Bloglines’. If you want to sign up for a free Bloglines account click here and you can start adding your favourite blogs.

Setting up a Blog.

stephaniebeard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 10:15:23 +0000

There are many places that you can go to set up a blog. Edublogs host this blog, but a number of the blogs on my blogroll are hosted by ethink. Both of these providers use ‘Wordpress’ blogging technology so they will feel very similar, although the range of styles that they offer to change your ‘look and feel’ differ significantly.

To sign up for an edublogs blog click here.

To sign up for an ethink blog click here (this is hosted in Shropshire).

Edublogs also provide a link to a 3 minute tutorial click here to watch and listen (note headphones or speakers will be necessary to access the useful information). Click here to see some more links to tutorials.

Blogging in the Classroom

stephaniebeard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 10:04:03 +0000

We are holding a twilight session tonight to look at blogging in the classroom. We hope to add any new sites that are created to our ‘blogroll’ so that we can see how schools are using this technology.

By the end of the session we hope that everyone will have:

viewed at least two existing blogs
added a comment to an existing blog
set up a blog for themselves (or their school)
set up some categories to organise posts
added a post to their blog and assigned it to a relevant category
edited a post
explored the ‘dashboard’ and ‘options’ to see how the blog could be modified and posts, categories etc can be modified.
had a look at available themes to alter the look and feel of their blog

We would also be very grateful if people could add a comment to this post before they leave, providing one way that they might use (or choose not to use) this technology within their school.