In past years I often written reviews of the years blogging, this year I am a little lazier this is a wordle for the titles of the 90 posts I made here this year.
A list after the jump:
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Tag: blogging
WordPress 4.4 embed other WordPress Posts
I’ve not really checked out the new features of WordPress 4.4 in any depth but this new feature looks interesting. Just pasting a url to another WordPress blog post into the editor creates an embedded ‘card’ with some details.
I could imagine this would make a nice way of linking to pupil or class blog posts in a school blog. Hopefully we will not wait too long before Glow Blogs get to WordPress version 4.4.
I’d have like it even more if the embed above had picked up the featured image for the post. Update, I think there is something unexpected going on with this post, either from the styles here or on the embedded post. looking at the source, there does seem to be an image in there! More investigation tomorrow. Update 2: the thumbnail shows up for me now!
WordPress to Medium
I’ve read a lot of interesting things on Medium over the last couple of years. It seemed to start as an online space to write longer-than tweet posts, and evolved.
I’ve never written more than a few comments and one test post on Medium before this. I’ve been excited about blogging in a Domain of One’s Own and the ideas around that and those coming from the IndieWeb. A lot of the IndieWeb technology goes a wee bit over my head but I’ve installed a bunch of plugins here and thing about it a bit.
One of the IndieWeb ideas is POSSE Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This site auto posts links to twitter and G+ as do many blogs. I can now send posts to Medium too.
Medium now have an API and there is a Medium/WordPress plugin which allows you to push blog posts to Medium. There are also Medium IFTTT recipes that will do the same thing from other blogging systems. I’ve installed the plugin here.
I don’t suppose I’ll send posts to Medium often, it seems a little too writerly for me, but it is fun to play with and think about a further extension of blogging.
The WordPress plugin attaches the Medium account to your profile, so if you have more than one person posting to a blog they all could posse to different medium accounts. There are settings for copyright and for posting links to the posts in different spaces. The API does not allow you, as of now, to update posts on Medium from your blog. There is a Meta Box on the WordPress post editor to set the status of Medium posts as you go.
Technical note: I had a bit of trouble getting plugin to work as it uses php short echo tags and I had to do a bit of find-and-replace in the plugin files. I am not sure if that will effect many folk.
I read about this first not in medium but my RSS reader, followed through to these interesting links:
- Ulysses (and Other Apps) to Gain Medium Publishing Support – MacStories
- Hey there, Medium, nice to meet you! — Building Ulysses — Medium
- Medium has an API?
Update, multiple Also published on Medium lines appear at the top of this post, I do not know why?
Glow Blogs at Scottish Learning Festival
I’ve spent the last couple of days talking about Glow and Glow Blogs in particular at the Scottish Learning Festival.
Today I was co-presenting at a seminar on Blogs with Mrs Andrea Hunter and three of her pupils from Whinhill Primary. I asked Andrea to be involved as I enjoyed her blog last session at Gourock Primary, for example: Why Blog? Andrea has since moved on to Whinhill Primary and is blogging with her class who joining in with Blogging Bootcamp #2 like champions.
The Pupils did a great job and Mrs Hunter spelled out how to organise blogging in the classroom supporting and scaffolding their learning perfectly. This allowed me to just talk about blogging in general, touch upon my favourite topic of syndication.1 and explain a little about how the e-portfolio plugin is coming on. The seminar was filmed and I hope it published somewhere as Andrea and the pupils presentation is well worth sharing wider.
My day was made when later on twitter let me know about this post: SLF 2015 on Diary of a Whinhill Pupil. The Whinhill team had gone off around the SLF floor and must have commandeered a few computers to post to their blog.
I also managed to show a demo of the new Glow Blogs e-portfolio/profiling plugin to a few folk over the two days and it was well received. We hope to have this released later this year.
Featured image Mrs Andrea Hunter, used with permission.
1. I might have mentioned on the blog a few times that I like aggregation, and believe this is a wonderful addition to Glow Blogs. More on this soon. ↩
mp3 (and other files) upload on iOS Finally
Finally ios allows upload of files from more than the photo library. This is just the first mp3 I found in my Dropbox. It is a recording n Buchanian st. In Glasgow.
The more includes OneDrive for glow folk.
This opens up lost of possibilities for blogging and podcasting on the move.
Blogging advice and Bootcamp #2
Top 10 Reasons for Students to Blog by sylviaduckworth CC-BY
I tweeted this lovely image the other day when I saw it on Classroom Blogging Options. The Glow Blogs option was not discussed 😉 but I’d hope that it would be under consideration for Scottish learners and teachers.
Saw the graphic again today along with this advice from Stephen Downes:
It has been a while since I ran a good ‘blogging in schools’ post, but the activity – and the advice – still makes as much sense today as it did in the heyday of blogging. Maybe even more sense, because unlike the early 2000s, there are many other shorter and less-structured ways students can communicate online, and blogging pulls them back into the realm of extended descriptions, arguments, explanations, and actual efforts to communicate thoughts and feelings rather than quips and reactions (or should I say, reax). Theere are many reasons to write; conveying information is just one of them. Wes Fryer also summarizes a number of the tools available as we start the 2015 fall session. Nice graphic, too.
Classroom Blogging Options (August 2015) ~ Stephen’s Web
Some great advice.
Just in time for Blogging Bootcamp #2 | Get your blogs up and running Autumn 2015 which we are starting to organise. If you want to learn a bit about classroom blogging over 5 weeks you can sign up
Blogging Bootcamp Video Review
I’ve had a half finished draft post about Blogging Bootcamp in the works since the bootcamp finished. I still hope to finish it but thought I used the excuse of the Teaching with WordPress course to post this shortish screencast.
I’ve also got a huge post about the 5Rs presentation I bungled at teachmeetGLA this week which will fit in nicely with #TWP15 too. Perhaps I’ll chop that up and post wee bit as it is getting out of control.
Signing on to #twp15
Fools rush in, foolish fools sign up at the last minute.
I’ve just signed up for Teaching with WordPress
This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:
- open education, open pedagogy and design
- WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
- examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
- plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other
Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.
If I get through 10% of the above I’ll be doing well. The course is organised by Christina Hendricks who I’ve met on etmooc and ds106.
I’ve not started a new blog for the course as I hope anything I post will be relevant to this blog (which I hope focuses on learning).
The course is obviously based in higher ed, but I’ve learnt a lot fro reading HE blogs over the past few years and I don’t think there are any of the learning objective that are not applicable to primary and secondary education.
The course has a Blog Hub where hopefully my post categorised as teachingWP will end up. (this aggregation of learners blogs to a course hub is something I am very excited about, having seen it in action a few times. I recently ran a 10 week blogging bootcamp for Scottish schools using the same technique.
A Brief Introduction
For anyone who ended up here from a #twp15 tweet or the blog hub.
I am a primary teacher by trade, currently working as an ict staff development officer in North Lanarkshire (121 primaries) and seconded to the Scottish Government as a product owner for Glow Blogs.
Glow blogs is a blogging system for Scottish schools. it consists of 33 instances of WordPress. More information on glow blogs on the Help Blog. I guess one of my goals for this course is to improve that help site.
I started blogging with my pupils in Sandaig Primary on Sandaig otters in 2004 using pivot (not wordpress), and organised various other blogs.
This blog started off on pivot in 2005 and I move to WordPress last year, although I used WP elsewhere for several sites. Two of the more interesting ones being ScotEdublogs, an aggregation of Scots Educational Blogs and Edutalk. I have a DS106 blog, the 106 drop in.
My main technical excitements about blogging are RSS and syndication/aggregation. I am interested in giving pupils purpose through audience.
Now we will see if this gets to the mothership.
Chalking my First Slate
I had a bit of a play with Adobe Slate this morning. It is an iOS app for publishing words and pictures.
It is quite a very process which allows you to get good looking results quickly. Macworld points out some limitations that struck me immediately.
It’s dead-simple, but also quite limited. You can choose from a handful of themes to change the whole look of the story, but can’t adjust individual fonts or formats, or even add a link within a larger block of text. (You can, however, place links as standalone buttons.) You can change image formats so they appear full screen, inline, or as a scrolling “window,” but you can’t add borders or freely move images around. Video isn’t supported at all.
What we gain
I guess slate is part of the same move to allowing producers to concentrate on the content while the ‘professionals’ provide the design.
Like Medium you cannot argue with the results from a clean readable point of view.
We can publish text and pictures easily on a blog. I am sure we can find a theme or two with typography that is as good, but I suspect it might be hard to find such elegant handling of images.
What we lose
I am not a professional writer or photographer, neither am I a designer or coder (obviously;-)).
I publish ‘stuff’, sometime approaching stories, because it is fun and I want to explore the potential of these activities for learning. I have different degrees of interest in all aspects of the process, I think I can learn from each.
I’ve been thinking about the tension between ease of use and creativity for a while. For learners we will sometimes want them to concentrate on one particular aspect of the work. I can’t be the only teacher who sometimes asked pupils to leave font and style changes till the story was finished. At other times we will want them to get fully involved in messy learning.
We also lose some control of the data when we publish to silo sites. I am pretty sure that Medium and Adobe will be around a lot longer than Posterous, but I still like backups.
Alternatives
Just as I am writing this I remember an earlier experiment A Walk to Loch Oss using Odyssey.js
The odyssey.js library is being developed to help journalists, bloggers, and other people on the web publish stories that combine narratives with maps and map interactions. The library is open source and freely available to use in your projects. It is initially being built to work with most modern browsers
from: odyssey.js README on GitHub. Odyssey.js adds maps to the mix but might be an interesting alternative to Slate that allows you more control and ownership. I am sure there are others out there.
update
After I posted this I kept thinking about the ‘own your own’ argument and decided to have a wee go at replicating the story myself.
A bit of googling for CSS hints and a couple of JavaScript libraries and I have The Devil’s Pulpit 2, handcrafted.
It is nowhere near as slick as the Adobe version(surprise) and so far does not look good on mobile.
It was a lot of fun to play with but I noticed a lack of attention to the actual story in my process.
I guess the best thing about tools like slate is the way they get out of your way and let you focus on content. I just like some of the fussing and futzing that goes with more basic solutions sometimes.
Rethinking comments
I would say that it might be worth rethinking “comments” on student blogs altogether – or rather the expectation that they host them, moderate them, respond to them. See, if we give students the opportunity to “own their own domain,” to have their own websites, their own space on the Web, we really shouldn’t require them to let anyone that can create a user account into that space. It’s perfectly acceptable to say to someone who wants to comment on a blog post, “Respond on your own site. Link to me. But I am under no obligation to host your thoughts in my domain.”
from: Men (Still) Explain Technology to Me: Gender and Education Technology
There are a lot of interesting and powerful parts of this post by Audrey Watters but this interests me in all sorts of ways.
Thinking from the pov of a teacher working with primary pupils I’d want the ease of posting comments for pupils to continue, but if that could be done on their own space, with the option for some sort of universal trackback notifying the site commented on it would be really interesting. This of course links in to my reading around POSSE & the indieweb.
The whole post addresses much more important issues and I recommend it highly.