Could an edubuzz blog potentially be a place where all East Lothian Parent Councils - and Parent Forum members - get involved with what’s happening across the county?
Some time ago we set up the “Parents” blog (http://edubuzz.org/blogs/parents) to support consultation on the draft Parental Involvement strategy (20 pages, pdf, 800KB).
Now that the Parent Councils are up and running, meetings are now taking place of the East Lothian Association of Parent Councils. That raised issues of communications between the individual councils.
- How do Parent Councils keep in touch with what other councils are doing?
- Where can you find links to East Lothian Parent Council web sites?
- Where can you find updates on what’s happening county-wide, such as the Association meetings?
Our current plan is to use the Parents blog as a place to share this information, and hopefully promote the integration of all parents into East Lothian’s leading networked education community. If you’d like to contribute to the site, please get in touch and we’ll help get you started.
Over at SupportForAll, the blog about support for learners in East Lothian, you can read about how a Polish parent is helping in the classroom at Musselburgh’s Burgh Primary.
She doesn’t have much English herself, but is able to read Polish from bilingual books to a pupil who doesn’t speak English.
We purchased bilingual story books and the mum read the Polish version and I was able to echo in English. When she heard the story in Polish, my P1 pupil was really excited and the rest of the class were fascinated. Now that they are a regular event the other children also enjoy these sessions and are beginning to predict what I am going to say based on what has been read and they are able to pick out some Polish words if they are repeated a lot within the story.
120 school PCs, and over 20 from East Lothian offices, were connected today at 11.30am. And about 100 from elsewhere. Not many people know that.
Over at Windygoul Primary, Emma Griffiths has today posted a short film of small group work in the nursery, focusing on listening skills, building literacy, and co-operative group behaviour using “The Tiger Who Came To Tea”.
It’s another good example of how the combination of classroom video cameras, combined with web publishing, now enables useful sharing of classroom practice at very low cost.
Another recent example was by Mhairi Stratton of East Lothian’s Maths Recovery team, who published a short video showing how real-world problems can be used to help children develop their own strategies for problem solving.
Here’s an outline of what’s involved in publishing these videos:
- Connect the video camera and start iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.
- Import the original digital video file.
- Export the video in a suitable format, e.g. a low resolution Quicktime movie.
- Upload the video file to Google video, and copy the URL of the video’s web page.
- In your WordPress post, click the yellow “A” toolbar button (for Anarchy Media Player) and paste the URL in where requested.
- Publish your post - done!
If this is a question that’s been troubling you, your troubles are over. Just head over to the Lists page.
Alongside the existing lists we’ve now added the mother of all eduBuzz lists, a complete list of all blogs by name. In fact, there’s another one listing them all by URL too. Mother has a twin.
Recently we’ve had a report of comment spam on an eduBuzz blogger’s Bubbleshare album. If you use Bubbleshare, and you’d like to avoid that risk, it’s easy to prevent comments being left.
Under Album Properties, just uncheck the Comments tick-box labelled “Allow visitors to Comment on this album”.
Preston Lodge High School’s daily news blog, Today@PrestonLodge.net, has toppled Don’s Learning Log from the eduBuzz No. 1 spot over the past month.
The site is one of a portfolio of 15 blogs developed by Preston Lodge, centred on PrestonLodge.net, which displays a “river of news” stream of latest headlines from all the individual blogs. (Thanks, FeedBlendr!) The blogs currently include: Continue reading ‘Today@PrestonLodge.net reaches No. 1 spot’
eduBuzz blogs now have a “Paste from Word” editor button.
Up till now, if you pasted content from Word then you’d often end up with odd-looking results. That happened because pasting brought over not just the content you wanted, and structural information like tables, but also formatting information, such as fonts and font sizes. Ideally, we want the blog’s theme to control presentation to keep posts looking consistent.
The WordPress Plain Text plugin, suggested by Ollie Bray, provides an alternative solution. Because this is such a common problem, we’ve installed it as a site-wide plugin.
The key benefit it brings is the ability to include tables in blog posts and pages in a way that avoids any need to use HTML.
Here’s an example of pasting from a Word document using the tool.
Continue reading ‘eduBuzz blogs now feature “Paste from Word”’
The edubuzz.org home page has been given a new look to make it easier for people to explore the site.
There are still some loose ends to tidy up, but in keeping with the “release early, release often” philosophy, it’s time to give it a try and start listening to the feedback.
This version builds on the feedback from the last prototype. That showed that providing some pointers to help visitors start exploring was well received. That version, though, was built during the summer break but proved too complex to be sustainable under the pressures of term-time workloads.
The new version is simpler, but provides more information. It’s completely blog-based, with no bespoke code other than a customised WordPress theme, modified using standard template tags. That means maintenance can be shared, so volunteers are welcome to contribute.
Current features include:
There’s still more work to do, such as:
- lists of project blogs
- lists of support department blogs
Feedback welcome
