Twitter, if you’ve not already encountered it, is a service worth knowing about. It’s like really simple blogging, but, with each post limited to 140 characters, is used more for conversational updates. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.
It’s used by a wide range of people and organisations, from 10 Downing Street to Stephen Fry to quite a few of the online education community. How might schools use it? Here are some possibilities:
- Use text message Twitter updates to post on-the-spot updates from school trips or visits
- Display the Twitter updates in the sidebar of the school or class blog
- Follow a topical Twitterer - such as Barack Obama - to get news stories faster than radio or TV
Now you can display your latest Twitter updates (or anyone else’s) using a widget on your edubuzz WordPress blog using Rick’s Twitter for WordPress plugin. Just activate the plugin and configure your Twitter widget(s).
That 5-minute Glow Guide was, er, not quite a full 5 minute’s worth. I guess the upload had got interrupted, so the screencast video cut out before the end. It works now, so there’s no need to lose sleep worrying if it all ended happily. (Flash movie, 14MB)
East Lothian Police want you to be safe over the holidays, and would like to ask you to be sensible! Find out more about their new B-Safe B-Sensible campaign.
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TODAY 14th April, 4pm, John Muir House
EduBuzz Open Meetings are open to anyone with an interest in improving East Lothian education by building a networked learning community. To date we’ve welcomed staff, parents and students.
The purpose of the meetings is to provide an informal forum where participants can discuss what we’ve learned over the past month or so, and help shape next steps.
Location is: Large conference room, Education & Children’s Services (2nd Floor), John Muir House, Brewery Park, Haddington
If you’re planning to attend, please let Susan McNaught (01620 827595) know so that we have an idea of numbers. Thanks!
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”’
