Archive for August, 2008

All East Lothian Staff Can Create eduBuzz Blogs

Published by
David Gilmour
at August 20, 2008 in eduBuzz. 0 Comments

All East Lothian staff with either school or council email addresses can now use “Create new blog“.

After a spate of spam blogs, this option was temporarily restricted. Before long, usage took off and we had to keep the restriction in place to avoid server overload. Capacity has now been increased, and restrictions partially lifted. If you’re East Lothian staff, you can now create as many edubuzz blogs as you want. What are you waiting for?

Using French Videos from Dailymotion in Your eduBuzz Blog

Published by
David Gilmour
at August 19, 2008 in WordPress and eduBuzz. 0 Comments

French video sharing site Dailymotion.com offers a wide range of entertaining French-language videos which can help make language learning fun. And if you’ve an edubuzz blog, you can easily embed them in your posts. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Click “Menu” in the bottom right of the video, then choose “URL and embed code”
  2. Under the Embed box, click “Copy code”.
  3. In your WordPress blog’s editor, click the yellow A (for Anarchy) toolbar button.
  4. Paste the Embed code into the box that pops up. (You’ll notice the box says “For DAILYMOTION and BREAK videos and iTUNES IMIXES just copy and paste the code from their embeddable players.)

Thanks are due to Jackie Swan for the idea. And here’s the end result, using one of Dailymotion’s most popular recent videos:

eduBuzz Videos Teach WordPress in 5 Mins!

Published by
David Gilmour
at August 14, 2008 in WordPress and eduBuzz. 5 Comments

The eduBuzz Support Wiki at http://edubuzz.org/support now features five short video tutorials on WordPress.

Each video is around 5 minutes long, and is ideal for new users or for people needing a quick intro to the redesigned back-end menu system. Topics covered are:

The videos, presented by James Farmer, are from WPMU DEV Premium.

Catch up on eduBuzz’s new menus with this 5-min video

Published by
David Gilmour
at August 14, 2008 in Sharing practice, Tools, WordPress and eduBuzz. 1 Comment

Edubuzz.org has been updated over the holidays, so if you’ve an edubuzz blog you’ll notice changes to the admin screens. If you just need a quick tour of the basics, get your speakers on and watch the 5-minute video (11MB, opens in full-screen), or use the player below.

The good news is these changes make WordPress easier to use. The more advanced options, for example, have been moved below the Write Post screen to make the interface less intimidating for new users. This will make it easier for more students and staff to get started with web publishing.

Some new features have been added in response to feedback from WordPress users world-wide. These include:

  • the ability to set the size of image thumbnails, and to use mid-sized thumbnails
  • the replacement of the separate Upload area, which confused some people, with “Add Media”
  • a full-screen editing option
  • easier, more obvious, options for making posts appear on future dates

Jeffrey Zeldman provides a good 10-point summary of the key changes.

Of course, if you need a bit more assistance, please get in touch by leaving a comment or by email.