East Lothian Education ICT Team

This month, East Lothian Council, in partnership with Lothian and Borders Police, will be hosting a series of Internet safety and responsible use training sessions for parents with pupils in P5 - S6 across the county.  This is in response to growing concerns, expressed by individual parents and parent councils, about how to make sure young people use the internet safely and responsibly. The sessions are also designed to show parents how they can protect their youngsters from on-line dangers.

These have been modified with scripts from Automattic’s WordPress Widget pack. You can now activate and use Sidebar Widgets on both themes. Activate them by going to the Plugins menu. Then go to Presentation / Sidebar Widgets to drag the ones you want from the widgets toolbox.

If a blog is to engage children - either as authors or as audience - it has to look attractive. And the authors need to have a real sense of ownership. So wouldn’t it be good if they could use their own image in the blog’s header? Some themes let you do that yourself - such as Freshy - but not very many.

With some WordPress themes, we can make the change behind the scenes. A good one for this is the WP-Andreas01 theme, which usually features a snow scene image. if you make up an image of your own which is the same size as the front.jpg file provided with the theme, we can make you up a custom version of the theme. Here are some we’ve done earlier:

Glowboy’s blog: http://edubuzz.org/blogs/glowboy

Pencaitland Primary Blog: http://edubuzz.org/blogs/pencaitland
Unfortunately, because everyone shares the same theme files on our multi-user system, there’s a bit of fiddling needed to set this up - you can’t do it yourself. Please contact David Gilmour if you want to know more, or if you want to try this out.

Bloggers on Exc-el/eduBuzz now have the option of using Snap Preview.

You’ve maybe seen Snap Preview in action before, for example on Ollie Bray’s blog. If not, hover your mouse over this link. Get the idea? If you want this on your blog, just go to the new Extras tab (it’s under Presentation) and switch it on.

It’s potentially quite powerful in making dull-looking links into much more tempting places to visit - but only if you’re linking to attractive-looking sites, I suppose!

By default, it doesn’t provide a preview of links to the same domain (in our case exc-el.org.uk). As that would prevent preview of other blogs, I’ve changed that so that it does, using this reference.

Thanks to Patrick Chia for his wpmu-snap plug-in. Because it’s a site-wide plug-in, there’s no need for you to activate the plug-in yourself - it’s controlled completely via the Extras tab.

Give it a one-word Flickr tag (Presentation / Theme Option) and this theme will find a handful of matching images, and use them to make up a multi-photo header image. You can see it currently on the Theme Test blog. There’s no prize for guessing the Flickr tag it’s using!

I’ve just installed Andrew Sutherland’s version 2.0.1 of the plugin - check it out! Lynne Lewis at Pencaitland Primary had just been in touch about the lack of widget functionality in the earlier version - this fixes that. Have a look at how Lynne’s using it in the right sidebar of the Pencaitland Primary blog to find out who’s reading the blog.

Here’s how Andrew describes some of the new features in Democracy 2.0:

* In-post polling: just insert {.democracy:12} (without the period) to place the poll with ID #12
* Localizable: All strings are set up for localization. A .po (or .pot or whatever) file will come in newer versions
* Slick new design
* Edit all options in the Admin panel
* IP-logging is now optional
* A ‘widget’ for your sidebar.
* Sexy new readme.html file

That readme.html file is mostly geeky installation stuff, but look carefully and you’ll find simple instructions on how to put Polls in Posts and Pages of your blog.

Early years

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