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?
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:
Thanks are due to Jackie Swan for the idea. And here’s the end result, using one of Dailymotion’s most popular recent videos:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Today we’ve entered Edubuzz.org for the BECTA ICT Excellence Awards Support for Schools category.
This category aims to reward those organisations who support school improvement with ICT, encouraging the systematic and innovative use of appropriate technologies to deliver learning and teaching, communicate with the wider school community and improve administrative efficiency.
Luckily it’s accepted that not every project will hit all the targets, so our inability to make any claims for improving admin efficiency shouldn’t be too much of a disadvantage. Last year’s winners were announced in November, so we may have a while to wait before we know how things have gone…
Preston Lodge High School students are helping engage young people in the local Longniddry Gala by creating an attractive, interactive web site based on an edubuzz weblog.
The project started with an approach from Richard Walsh of the Gala Committee, who had noticed Preston Lodge’s lively prestonlodge.net site, and approached the school to see if they could help him do something like it for the Gala.
Calum Stewart at the school agreed to help, and developing the site is now part of the Duke of Edinburgh Award activities for some students at the school. Educational benefits of this project include:
East Lothian is starting to find out what it’s possible to do with Glow.
Mentors met after-school again today for an informal session where Dave Rawson , ELC’s Glow Implementation officer, showed some of the things that he’s been doing, and some things going on in other authorities. This screenshot, for example, shows the way the East Lothian page of the Glow portal is currently looking. (Click the image to enlarge.)
Tranent’s Sanderson’s Wynd Primary P7 have just published the podcasts created for their “What’s New” project.
This set of video enhanced podcasts, produced with the assistance of professional podcast and theatre staff, take podcasting in East Lothian schools to a new level. The end result is a high quality piece of work which is a real asset to the town.
Throughout January and February 2008 the pupils of P7W and P7T worked with podcast artist John Harris, their teachers Lynne Welsh and Karen Thomson, and theatre practitioners Clare Stewart and Ashley Taylor, to create a new series of podcast episodes called “What’s New?”. These take a look at the industrial history of Tranent and its surrounding area, in particular its mining heritage.
Yesterday blog number 1000 was created for a P7 student at the small rural Innerwick Primary School.
It was part of a set of 7 for the P7 members of Lindy Lynn’s composite P4/5/6/7 class, reflecting the increasing use of blogs to provide web publishing tools to individual students. The blogs will be used by the P7s for a project to reflect on their time at Innerwick, and the group are full of ideas!
Staff are also talking about the possibility offered to get some collaborative work going with other feeder primaries in the Dunbar Grammar School cluster, with the aim of helping the children to get to know some other students who’ll be joining them at the much larger secondary after the summer.
In another sign of the times, due to staff pressures, the P7 group were trained in a 3-hour session yesterday morning, without their class teacher, in how to use the blogs, and - not surprisingly - picked it up very quickly. They’ll now be training their teacher, and supporting one another, to get started in the classroom.
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Here you'll find a range of staff learning logs, blogs by support teams and central support departments.
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