Tag: Glow Blogs

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Last Friday at the same time as the glow authentication changed, the new glow blogs service went live. I posted about this over on Glow Connect.

It was pretty exciting stuff, the developers were really working right up to the last minute and beyond to deliver the service. Even so we have gone live with a few know issues and have already discovered a few more.

At the start of the processes I certainly was not aware of all the complexities involved nor the scale of the job. Turns out it was a big complex job!

Luckily for me I ended up working with an amazing team, not only in the Scottish Government, but in the developers and suppliers. All of them worked long hours with very positive attitudes as I grumbled along. I am tempted to turn this post into a list of these characters and their qualities, but probably enough to say all of the blog team were essential to the process.

What Have We Got

Stray Puppy by p medved
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

At the end of this phase we have a working set of WordPress MU, one for each Local Authority, running the same version of the software as before and we have the known issues linked above.

The main improvement so far is around blog creation. There is no connection to SharePoint/old glow groups. This simplifies the process a great deal. This and other Main Changes are listed in the Glow Blog Help, some of these are not improvements but changes.

One more improvement, not listed, is that you can now upload files of up to 50mb to blogs. This should make it a lot easier to podcast or share small videos without using a third party site or service.

On Wednesday I popped back to North Lanarkshire to watch my colleague Ann McCabe set up a class of e-portfolios, this was much quicker than before, taking away at least half the steps. There is still plenty of room from improvement and I got a great idea to take back to Victoria Quay from the RM help desk who I visited in the afternoon.

Next Up

Given the above, if this was the end point in the process I’d be pretty disappointed. A lot of work for not much in the way of improvement. I am not disappointed due to two things, phase 2 and phase 3.

Phase 2 was looking quite simple, upgrade to a new version of WordPress. This will bring a host of benefits, better user experience especially on mobile being the main gain. More important, in the longer run, is that it gives us a much better base to develop on.
The other aspect of phase 2 will be to backfill in things that were dropped out of phase one or needs that were discovered in phase 1.

It looks like phase 2 will take a bit more work than I expected, but this will start straight off. Already some of the first problems to be discovered has been solved and the developer team are just waiting to decide when to deploy the code. Another potential ongoing problem with server load is now beginning to be understood and the team are working on finding the best solution. The team are keen that the server gets a chance to bed in and are suitably cautious about changing things on the live system, best practises for ongoing change and development are being put in place.

Bright Future

After we get to phase 3 of the project things might speed up a bit. We will be using WordPress 4 which will allow a lot of nice things to happen.

The one I am most excited about is giving a more flexible service. In the old glow blogs it was a constant frustration for myself and many others that our theme and plugin requests were never answered. I am not entirely sure of all the reasons for this, but having peeped behind the curtain I presume some of this was to do with testing.

Watching the new blogs service develop gave me a bit of a shock in the amount of time and effort it needs to deliver a service of this scale. Like many folk who publish stuff on the web I frequently make changes without much of a care and worry. The Technical Architects and developers for glow take a somewhat different view. There first concern is the preservation of users data and stability of the service and given they are taking care of over 100,000 blogs…

The glow blogs system now consists of 4 main servers: integration (where new code is added after code review), explore (for testing), pre-production (more testing) and live. With the older version of WordPress we are using a lot of the development and testing is manual, the testers here and volunteers going through lists of test to test the functionality of the blogs. In addition there is security, load and a many more tests.

Going forward the process should be automated, the newer version of WordPress can have a deal of automatic testing, code going onto the integrate server would be pushed through the different servers being automatically tested on the way, this gives us the possibility of a much more agile service.

On the Way

On Friday last week there was a fair amount of cheering and happy faces around the glow office, since then feedback has been mainly positive. I am not really ready to celebrate yet, there still is a lot to do before we reach the point learners and teachers in Scotland have a world class blogging platform. There so many possibilities out there for doing all sorts of things with WordPress. We would, of course be really interested to hear of any ideas of what you would like from Glow blogs.

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I posted this this afternoon:

The Glow Blogs migration export will start on 19th September 2014

Any new posts or content added to blogs after that date will not be migrated to the new service.

The new service should be up and running by Oct 3rd 2014

The data from the current blog servers will be exported on the 19th of September and migrated to the new service ready for the go live date.

We’re making every effort to achieve the deadline of the new service for 3rd October. If anything changes, we will get in touch immediately.

This is not technically a content freeze as users will be able to add to their blog, rather it should be considered as a procedural content freeze.

We hope to be able to add a message to explain the situation to every blog dashboard but in case that is not technically possible we need as much help as we can get in spreading the word.

from: Glow Blogs Migration News | Glow Connect, Glow Connect is the information portal for Glow – a space for providing updates on the development and enhancement of the service and for sharing how teachers are using Glow.

Joshi by Juan Coloma Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

I am sorry that the warning time for the content freeze is only just over two weeks, but it is only now we can give an estimate, timing is tight, it might even slip a wee bit, but we though it best to try and give as much notice as we can.

Back in June we proposed a content freeze over a short period over the summer and possibly another in September or October, as it turned out the summer freeze did not happen as it would not have given us any advantage, we could do a text export without a freeze.

We (especially the coders, technical and test members of the team) are very much working flat out to get the blogs migration in on time, the date is the current best estimate of when we will be ready to export the data from the RM servers and import it into the new one.

Earlier we hoped that the freeze would be a bit shorter that we are now estimating, but it has become apparent that it will take a bit longer. Between the 19th and go live several things need to happen:

  • The database and web server files (images and uploads) need to be encrypted and copied to a secure disk. Before encryption a sort of fingerprint of the files is taken, this will let us know if the files we put on the new server are identical. The size of the database and files meant this will take a while.
  • The disk will be taken to the new hosting and copied onto the server.
  • It is then unencrypted and the md5 fingerprint compared to the original.
  • The files will be put in place and hooked up to WordPress, or rather 33 instances of WordPress one for each Local Authority plus a central one.
  • Lots of testing. Testing of other bits of the process, the new servers has already started.
  • There are several rounds of testing, of different types that I am just beginning to get my head round. This will insure we get the best possible service from the new blog. The final rounds of testing will involve users from across Scotland, first on a ‘test’ environment and then on the new server before it goes live.
  • After everything looks good the new server gets the old blogs.glowscotland.org.uk domain and the blogs will be updatable again.

I’ve not numbered the points above because I have missed out many more steps. The project plan has been worked over repeatedly to make sure the quality of the result is as good as can be and, by doing various things in parallel, we cut time down to the minimum. Extra test engineers have been borrowed from other parts of glow and other members of the team are helping with testing.

After the new service goes live the project will not stop, the blogs will then be upgraded to a current version of WordPress and then the third phase of the project, to enhance the blogs for learning and teaching will start.

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super ruper by nnnnic Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I’ve been trying to post information about the glow blogs migration here when I can, but still getting a few questions, via email, twitter etc. Here is a series of DMs:

Hi John. Been following the progress of GlowBlogs and reading your own blog. Question: Can I go ahead and set up a class blog using…

‘Old Glow’ and get class using it….then it’ll transfer across to ‘New-Glow’ with the bells and whistles in he coming weeks (months) ?

I (and other member of staff) really want to get cracking on this. How would we ensure the old style blog ‘goes accross’? Need to tell..

someone where it is?

Quite a few folk have asked the same sort of thing, can/should I set up a glow blog/e-portfolio now or wait?

The answer is: Yes if you set up a glow blog now it will be migrated to the new service.

Caveats

There will be a procedural content freeze, and the possibility of downtime if we do not make the 3rd of October deadline (we are working very hard to ensure we will).

Content Freeze

The database and files that make up the blogs are currently on RM servers, this need to be moved to new servers. Given the size of the data this will involve copying onto a portable disk. The copy will be encrypted. The disks need to be moved, the encrypted data securely moved to the new setup, unencrypted and verified. The new system then need to be thoroughly tested.

During this time the old blogs will be up and running, but any content added to them will not be migrated and new blogs setup during the content freeze through the old glow Sharepoint portal will not be migrated.

I am not sure how long the content freeze will be but it looks like being a week or so.

We will publicize the content freeze as much as possible, telling Glow Key Contacts in each Local Authority, publishing on Glow Connect and I’ll post here and tweet.

We also hope to be able to add a warning message on the dashboards of all the current glow blogs, but that solution needs to be created and tested.

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I’ve just made my first post on Glow Connect.

Glow Connect is the information portal for Glow – a space for providing updates on the development and enhancement of the service and for sharing how teachers are using Glow. 

This Glow Connect will be a central area for keeping up with glow development.

Here is the contents of the post:

Glow Blogs Update August 2014

I’ve made a few posts over the summer about the Glow Blog migration, which give a bit more detail about what is happening:
Glow Blogs Summer 2014
Blog Migration Notes: Users
Glow Blog Migration Notes: e-Portfolios

This is a further update.

The blog migration project is well underway. There are three or four main chunks of work that need to be completed. The first development, by Code for the People, has been making exceptional progress. The hosting procurement has been completed, removing a bit of worry. Plans for migration of the data from the old servers to the new environment are well under way and some exploratory work is being carried out. Test plans are coming together nicely, and it is great to watch the whole project coming to life.

My role as product owner is making a bit more sense, and it is delightful to work back and forward with the folk building the requirements, developing and getting ready for testing. The attention to detail by the members of the blog team gives me confidence that we are creating a great ‘product’.

There is still a planned content freeze. This will cover the time the data leaves the RM servers and is installed and set running on the new servers. It is expected that this will be around a week. Given that the data being transported is sensitive it will need to be handled with care, encrypted and unencrypted. We are hoping to be able to give plenty of warning around the time of the content freeze. We also hope to have a plugin in place in the existing blogs that will add a message about this to the dashboard of every blog.

The continues to be a risk that the migration will not be complete before the old servers are turned off on the 3rd of October which could result in some downtime, however we are managing this risk very closely.

In summary, we’re making good progress and I will keep you updated on Glow Connect.

I’ve been posting some glow blogs information here, so in the future I’ll probably cross post in the two places.

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Lost Puppy

Lost Puppy flickr image by Tim Shields Creative Commons – CC BY-NC 2.0

Here are some notes around the effect that the glow blog migration will have on e-portfolios hosted on the WordPress instances. There are two main things to consider, users/members of blogs and links to access blogs.

User Management Issues

We are currently migrating the blogs, including e-portfolio blogs, to a new WordPress Server initially running the same version of WordPress 2.9.2

The set up will mirror the existing set up, an instance for each Local Authority. The URLs will stay the same.
The permission on the blogs and their private/glow only/ public setting will stay the same.
Only users who have previously visited the blogs while logged onto glow will have the same access.

Going forward the settings for blogs will be handled in the blog rather than Sharepoint. This is partially because the new Sharepoint is cloud based and cannot be customised in the same way as the old glow portal and partially because of the advantages of having blogs stand on their own two feet (see below for details).

Users who were granted roles on a blog though the old glow group in which the blog was created, but have never visited the blog will have to be added again. (There is no trace of these users in WordPress and therefore no way of migrating them). You can mitigate against this providing problems by asking those users to visit the blogs before the switchover. After migration Admin Users will be able to add these (or any other) users in in the blog admin dashboard.

I’ve covered more about User Management in a previous post: Blog Migration Notes: Users.

Finding your e-Portfolio

If users followed the advice on setting up glow blogs as e-Portfolios they would have created a group in the old glow portal to hold links to groups of e-portfolios. After the switch over to the new authentication in early October (3rd) the old portal will not be there.

There will be a need for teacher and pupils to be able to access blogs there are a few possibilities in the short term.

  • Lists created before the portal was migrated to O365 will still be there in your O365 group.They will be buried in the migrated content but can be resurrected.
  • You could copy and paste the list from old glow and paste into a new glow group.
  • You could recreate the lists. This would be my favoured option as I would distribute the work to pupils.

For the third approach you would need to create a space when pupils could add their e-portfolio URLs. This could be a links list in O365 or a share word document in OneDrive. Pupils would need to have permissions set so that they could add to the links or have edit permission on the document.

As a teacher I would not use links like this, too much work. I would bookmark them in my browser and put all the bookmarks in a folder. I could then log on to glow and open the folder of links in tabs. This would after a wee wait give me a set of tabs that I could quickly go through to visit each portfolio without clicks.

Post Migration Development

After migration it intended to move into phase 2 which will be an upgrade of the blog software from 2.9.2 to 3.9

Phase 3 will include improvements to the service, adding plugins and themes to increase functionality.

In Phase 3 it is the intention to improve the setup of e-portfolio blogs by improving the setup, improving how posts are organised and how the profiles are produced from those posts.
It hoped that this work should be completed by March 2015

WordPress only

The main advantages with moving the set up of blogs and e-portfolios away from Sharepoint to the WordPress server itself will be:

  • We will be able to keep the WordPress install a lot more up to date. This will allow users to benefit from new features as these are added to WordPress. With the old glow blogs it seems that it was to hard to upgrade WordPress.
  • The setup of e-portfolios will be shortened. currently I find it takes around an hour to go through the setup with a class of pupils assuming each pupil has access to a computer/device. Removing the Sharepoint element of the blogs will speed things up in the short term.
  • In the medium term the new blogs should let us develop new functionality which will speed things up even more and reduce the opportunities for making mistakes.
  • We should also be able to develop the portfolio functionality of the blogs though plugins. This could make the organisation of posts and production of the profile snapshot simpler.

Please get in touch if you have any questions about the glow blog migration.

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The Whole Gang, 50 Days old by Dean Searle Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

There is some background to this project in a previous post: Glow Blogs Summer 2014.

Before the migration of the glow portal Education Scotland suggested that schools did some pruning and tidying of their glow groups to make migration easier (less data) and so that users had less to sort through and sort out on the other end.

As the date for migration of blog gets nearer a few folk have been asking me about what is going happen to their blogs, if there is anything that they should be doing and what will change. This post will try and address some of the questions.

You should not need to do any pruning and tidying of your blogs. The intention is to migrate everything as is to the new system. I was always surprised to be asked about tidying up and deleting old posts from school and class blogs. for me a blog is for life, it is a positive that I could dive back into the archive and see some of what I was doing years ago.

The blog only knows about users that have visited already

One of the biggest changes will be the decoupling of the blogs from the old glow groups. In the current, old, system the users and permissions of those users are set inside the glow group that the blog was created in. Those groups will go away. After migration you blog will not be able to refer to the old sharepoint group to find out who has permission do do things (view, post, carry out admin tasks) the only users it will know about are ones who have already visited the blog when logged into glow.

For example:

  • Teacher A has set up a blog in the old glow for herself and 2 colleagues, Teacher B and Teacher C (not their real names) to share links about their subject with pupils.
  • Teacher A is the blog admin and The other two are contributors.
  • The blog is a public blog so anyone in the world can view it.
  • Teacher B has already added a couple of links by creating posts on the blog.
  • Teacher C has yet to log on to the blog.
  • After the switch over to the new authentication system and the blog migration Teacher A and B can log on, Teacher A is still an admin and Teacher B can log on and create posts.
  • When Teacher C tries to log on there is no entry in the WordPress database for him as having a role in this blog. If he has never used any glow blog he will not be in the database at all. Teacher C will not be able to log on or create posts.
  • At that point Teacher A will be able to log on to the dashboard, go to the users screen and add Teacher C as a contributor.

To avoid this scenario Teacher C would need to log on to the blog before the migration.

Japenese Spaniel by Muzik Hounds Attribution-NonCommercial License

New User Management

Going forward on the blog service the user management will be in the WordPress dashboard not in glow groups. This will develop over time. We are trying to have a system that is not dependent on other parts of the system, In the old glow the blogs were very much hooked into sharepoint in a way that made it difficult to upgrade. We ended up using a very out of date version of WordPress. In the future we should be able to keep the blog system up to date.

Unfortunately the standard WordPress user management is not really suitable for use in glow. This is based round email messages to add users to a particular blog. If for example 200 second years add their teachers to their e-portfolio blogs to allow them to see them each teacher added would get an email from each blog and have to click the link in the email to finish the process. It also requires you to add one user at a time. This is not sutiable and will not happen.

For the first stage of the new blog service the developers will add functionality so that if I add a user to my blog with a particular role they will be added but the email message will not be sent and the user will not need to confirm the addition. The interface will be changes so that I can add a list of glow usernames rather than just one at a time.

The main problem in this scenario will be finding out usernames. This is being dealt with by another team in the glow program. It may not be ready in time for the switchover. In that case it may be necessary to gather usernames is a manual way (get them sent in an email, find them in O365 or even get them written down on a bit of paper. Then make a list in a document to paste into the blog admin screen, save the doc).

It is planned that the class set functionality that was present in the old glow groups will be redeveloped. The second stage for the blogs will be that the class sets service will be an area where teachers can search for a class and them copy a list of usernames to paste into the user management screen in the dashboard of their blog.

The third development will be to bring the class set functionality into the user management screen directly. This will happen in the third phase of the blog migration and upgrade.

As the functionality is developed we will be able to make user guides for this process.

Please get in touch if you have any questions about the glow blog migration.

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One of the biggest frustrations working on the glow projects is the limits it places on open communication. I was expecting to be able to blog ideas and thoughts as I progressed through the blog migration. It turns out that this might have lead to procurement and legal difficulties.

A Very Excited Puppy by edanley Attribution License

I am delighted and excited that the blog migration project, which is what I’ve been spending the majority of my time on since January, is at a point where we can discuss our plans.

After a lot of work and investigation it has been decided that the best way to go forward with the blogging service is to continue to use WordPress for Glow Blogs. This might have seemed to be a no brainer, but we had to be sure we would not run into possible procurement challenges by assuming WordPress was the only solution.

How We Got Here and Why It Is Taking So Long

Current blogs hooked into sharepoint, use a very old version of WordPress.
There has been a lot of investigation on how the old blogs worked and were knitted into the sharepoint system of ‘Old Glow’ we now have a good understanding of the technical architecture and best way to move forward.

Things That Need to Be Done

Authentication, Blog Creation, User Management.

The new blogs will need to authenticate to the new RM Unify project. Blog creation is current done in the ‘Old Glow’ sharepoint portal. The new service will need to include an independent system for creating blogs. Likewise the old system used the old portal for user management, a new system will have to be created inside the WordPress platform. We anticipate that there are many opportunities for improving the blog creating and user management in the new system. We will also, hopefully avoid the problem of being tightly coupled to another service which should make future development of the blogs less problematic than it has been in the past.

We Have a Plan

We now have a full-time WordPress developer in the glow team who will have the role of overseeing the technical aspects of the blog project. We have procured the services of Code for The People to manage the migration process and upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress.

  1. Move: existing 2.9.2 blogs to new home, development of new authentication, blog creation and User management. This will reduce risk of any problems that might arise from trying to move directly to a new and up to date WordPress setup.
  2. Upgrade: to more recent version of WP We will, again to reduce risk, upgrade in stages. This should not be visible to end users.
  3. Improve: Phase Three…

The benefits of the new blog system should become apparent quite quickly.
Firstly here are many features of more recent versions of WordPress that will improve the system without any development. A better editor, better mobile experience, better handling of media.

Going forward into stage three, there should be an opportunity for a wider range of themes and plugins and the development of a system for requesting in installation of these.

We should be able to make pupil profile improvements. For example the creation of the profile blogs current take many many steps. It takes me about an hour to take a class through creation. We should be able to improve that, and perhaps other types of blogs site, by providing a wizard that is build into the system. We have the chance to develop a better system for producing the p7 & S3 profiles.

Aggregation, this could make the following and commenting on pupil profiles by staff much more efficient. Teachers could potentially have a page where they would see any new activity by any group of pupils they interact with.

There Is Always Some Risk

There are few possible risks which may result in extending the planned short freeze on the platform. If these push our migration date past Oct 3 the current blogs will not be accessible. Our current estimates are that we will meet our deadlines.

  • There is a potential period of blogs having a procedural content freeze or outage for a few days in the Summer. Possibly another content freeze in September or October. We will do our best to keep users informed about this. We have not yet identified length of these periods.
  • Things go wrong, exceptionally big project
  • I’d guess this is one of the biggest WordPress setups in the world, we are moving from version 2.9.2 to 3.9 or later this is a challenge.
  • There will be a great deal of testing of all stages in the migration, we will be starting the testing early to maximise benefit while minimising risk to delivery dates.
  • There are a lot of different aspects of Procurement that are hard to fathom before the exercise is complete. It is difficult to estimate times we have still to finalise the procurement of the hosting for the blogging system.

Class Sets, will not be ready for switchover time. RM unify does not currently have a way for the blogs to gather class and curricular groups to help with adding users to a blog and assigning them roles. We will develop interim solutions to assigning roles to multiple users (probably pasting in a list of usernames). This will hopefully be short term and be replaced by a more robust solution when class sets information is available in glow generally.

I managed to avoid ‘blog with two tails’ as the title of this post, but could not the puppy pictures;-)

Although this feels at times as if it is a long drawn out process, it has been (and is being) made enjoyable for me by working with (or mainly watching the the work carried out by) a great team of folk on the blog project. The first time I’ve worked with a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Architect, Tester or Developers in a formal setting has been one of the best things in my secondment so far.

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The Unicorn in Motion Rainbow

A wee bit of an update on the ‘glow product owner’ gig. The title is a bit of a mouthful and still difficult to explain. I should now be able to give an elevator pitch, but I am not quite there yet.

What I can do is give an idea of what I’ve been doing so far. We have started the business of creating teams that develop various aspects of the glow environment as projects.

The one I’ve had most to do with so far is the blog migration project. The main folk involved in this are: a project manager, a business analyst, a technical architect and myself as product owner. This is not a full time job for anyone, we are all involved in other projects, activities and meetings. We can also involve other people, say another technical architect with specialist knowledge or procurement experts.

We start by gathering requirements for the project, looking at what the blogs and e-portfolios do at the moment and what we would like them to do at the finish. A lot of this is understanding and unpicking how the blogs are connected to the glow service and authentication as it stands. This turns out to be quite complicated;-)

There are procedures for this sort of operation, with a standard way of writing the requirements. Luckily for glow I don’t directly do any of the writing, I just discuss, review and sometime make a decision.

By now we are near having a first draft of the requirements for the blog migration. Then this will then go for further examination from the technical and procurement experts. Then on through, options, ‘invitations to tender’, procurement and more.

I’ve probably missed a few steps and got some in the wrong order. The project also has dependencies on other projects, for example the authentication one, Ian owns that one.

A lot of this is not really what I am interested in, but more a way to get to what that is. That is things like, mobile blogging, better media handling, a quicker setup for e-portfolios plus some rainbows and unicorns. Things that will help learning. The whole project process is just a means to get from where we are to where we want to be through the procurement jungle and down the options river on a technical raft.

The other job I have is to decide when to drop a feature. This might be a blue sky idea that I love or something more realistic. The problem(for me) will come when that feature will have an impact of delivering on schedule, then I’ll have to move from giving ideas and advice to making the call.

The process is a fair distance from what my ideas of the job were. I had some sort of romantic vision of myself and a team of crack developers cranking out amazing services that just work. I now understand that there is a lot more to it. Before the crack developers start to work lots of other folk have their parts to play. Turns out that these folk are smart and a pleasure to work with. Maybe we will get rainbows and unicorns after all, it might just be it takes a bit more work than I though to get there.

The gif at the top of the pages is based on the public domain image from: File:The Horse in Motion.jpg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia by Eadweard Muybridge.

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Republished due to a wee bit of bother with the backend of my blog.

At the weekend Robert added a new feature to ScotsEduBlogs: ScotEduBlogs Professional

ScotsEduBlogs exists to help educational bloggers across Scotland to find each other and to talk to each other.

It has been created by members of the blogging community, and is kept up-to-date by its users (that means you!), who can add blogs and tag blogs.

It also allows anyone to keep up with what is being said across all Scottish educational blogs at a glance.

You alway could subscribe to a set of blogs via ScotsEduBlogs RSS feature, for example ScotEduBlogs tagged glowscotland or physics but these are RSS feeds. Now there is a page for professional blog posts, separate from class, pupil or teaching blogs. This could be used for cpd or just to keep an eye on other teacher/consultant/whatever blogs. If you visit SEB less frequently you will be able to see the ‘professional’ posts less chance of them being buried by class blog posts.

Recently with twitter coming to the fore as a way of keeping up with online community there have been new Scots Educational bloggers who have not added their blog to SEB now might be a good time to do so. If you do and you consider yourself an educational professional be sure to tag your blog Professional.

Sebbloglisting

Glow Blogs

There has been an influx of new blogs since glow has added blogging to its toolset. Unfortunately the glow blogs rss feeds do not play nicely with ScotEdublogs. They don’t play with glows own xml web part either.

There is a workaround, if you use FeedBurner to republish your RSS feed you can use that feed in ScotEdublogs. Feedburner is a google service now, you need to have a gmail account. You visit Feedburner sign in and fill in your RSS feed address.

Feedburner 1

Your RSS url will be the url of your blog with /feed tacked on the end, for example my test glow blog’s url is:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/

So its RSS feed is

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/feed/

After I put it into Feedburner I get a feedburner URL for the feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/org/NCnY

This last I can use to add my Blog to ScotEduBlogs:

add_a_blog

If you are a ScotsEduBlogger please think about adding your blog to ScotsEduBlogs and remember to tag it Professional if that cap fits.

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This post is the third in an attempted series about getting started blogging loosely linked to the launch of glow blogs.

Conversation by Rishi Menon
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I’e always considered blogging to be 3 pronged activity, providing purpose, gaining an audience and starting a conversation. All of these factors can motivate pupils. Blogging can be seen as a ‘real’ activity, writing for a world outside the classroom. It has a real audience who may start a conversation through comments.

Back in the day when I first started blogging at Sandaig there was not a lot of other classroom blogging going on, none at all in Scotland. This gave my class a bit of an advantage in gaining comments and we picked up a few folk who my class felt they had a relationship to. ‘Andy from Aberdeen’ who regularly added a good number of comments to our new blog and after a while Carol Fuller who became our fairy blogmother!

Comments added a lot to our blogging and podcasting in those days. Now with blogs popping up all over the place, the landscape has changed a bit. One one hand there is a bigger potential audience than before but that audience has more choice.

For a teacher who is already active online gaining an audience is not to difficult, they can publish links and requests for comments on their own blog or through twitter. If you get picked up by the right folk you can gather a lot of comments, i recently and responded to a twitter request for comments on a pupil blog as did many others, in a couple of days the pupils 68 word post had 45 comments!

A lot of the new blogs that are popping up now are not necessarily being run by teachers who have spent a lot of time in creating an online network so how do they get comments for their class? I’d suggest a few basic ideas:

  • In the process of explaining blogs to the class visit other blogs and as a class make comments.
  • Once your class are blogging confidently have them individually comment on other blogs.
  • As a teacher visit a couple of class blogs every week, leave a comment or two. Think of this as a sort of cross marking exercise.
  • As a class visit a particular blog regularly, find one that ‘fits’ in with your class and perhaps some sort of regular commenting will build up.
  • If something on another blog stimulates your pupils curiosity , ask questions, try out the activity, blog about it( example).
  • Respond to comments on your own blog. Often this will provide a useful learning activity and some fun.
  • Get in touch with another blogging teacher, do some lightly joined up planning.

In all of this commenting activity leave the url to your blogs in the URL field of the comment form. Teach the children to copy and paste this rather than typing it in, it is easy to make a typo, or put a semi colon instead of a colon and break the link.

Don’t assume that because children find the technology simple that they will write good comments, in the same way as with blog posts, they need advice and modelling. Some teachers might like to provide rules or a check list:

  1. Is the comment relevant? is it worth saying? (just cool is probably not).
  2. Is it generally positive & friendly? I suggest 2 stars and a wish for classmates work.
  3. Would you like a comment like this?
  4. Is the spelling and punctuation a good reflection on the commenter?

Anne Davis provides some comment starters: EduBlog Insights » Blog Archive » Thinking about the teaching of writing which are well worth sharing with pupils, I think I used to have them displayed on the wall.

If you are looking for somewhere to find blogs ScotEduBlogs aggregates blogs from across Scotland.
Glow blog list can be found for each local authority, for example the url for North Lanarkshire is: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/ each of the other LAs has its own initials at the end of the url (full list).
Further Afield Tom Barrett has be collecting primary class blogs on delicious which provides a great list.

If you know of other ways to encourage commenting you could leave me a comment;-)