(cross-posted from the Yukon Public Schools Learning Showcase website) This semester, students taught by Debbie Callison at the Yukon Middle School 6th Grade Academy have been writing and sharing their poetry online using free, interactive websites hosted by Kidblog.org. All the posts written by students, as well as comments submitted by others to each website,
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These are my notes from the January 30, 2012, Oklahoma City WordPress User’s group meet-up at The Div in Edmond. WordPress is a free, open-source content management system used by tons of folks worldwide to create websites. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. http://yesdancan.com is the website Dan Lovejoy built by hand (not
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(cross-posted from playingwithmedia.com) This semester I’m working on a contract basis (thanks to federal grant dollars) as an “innovative instructional coach” in Yukon Public Schools. This morning I helped one of our sixth grade teachers facilitate her first lessons using free, ad-free class blogs hosted by KidBlog.org. In this post, I’ll share some of the
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To take charge of your “digital footprint” online, you need to publish content which you “claim” virtually as your own. One effective way to do this is to add website links for sites where you regularly (or periodically) post using the Google+ Authorship program. (It’s free.) Some reasons to do this include: Customizing posts from
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If you work with CSS and WordPress, I’m hoping you can provide me with some quick advice for a minor page template change I need to make. On the K-12 Online Conference website, we’re currently using the WordPress theme “Permanent 3.0″ by NewWpThemes.com. By default I have the site pages set to use three columns,
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WordPress.com is a free, flexible blogging service but has some drawbacks. One of those limitations is the inability to directly include EMBED code in posts. To “protect” authors and blog visitors from potentially malicious code sometimes disguised as legitimate embed code, by default WordPress.com “strips out” embed code from posts when authors save and publish
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Last week I created a new WordPress website (learn.playingwithmedia.com) for the series of workshops I’m offering both face-to-face and via videoconference in December focusing on skills from my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” The main website for my book (playingwithmedia.com) is hosted for free by Posterous.com. The learn.playingwithmedia.com site, however, is
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You’re invited to join in “The 12 Days of Playing with Media:” A series of twelve workshops focused on learning more effective ways to communicate with digital text, images, audio and video in December 2011! Visit learn.playingwithmedia.com for complete details as well as registration links. Each workshop will be offered in three versions: a 3
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The decision by Google’s design team for Google Reader to integrate Google Plus “1+” sharing into Reader is understandable from one vantage point, but its current implementation is very poor and represents a functional downgrade for millions of Google Reader users. Brian Shih, the original (and former) program manager for Google Reader, was on the
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Today was a first: I read a blog post which appeared attributed to me that I never wrote! This wasn’t a scrape blog or a post intentionally crafted to mislead. Instead it was a case of “tweetribution confusion” via image attribution. In this post I’ll try to explain. Tannis Emann, a Canadien educator and @tmemann
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Here’s a great new feature of Google and YouTube I discovered today: For some blogs (not sure how they discriminate) Google is automatically aggregating all the YouTube videos shared in posts. Here’s my channel. These channels are “subscribable” using a YouTube account like a “normal” channel. This is a nice feature, and demonstrates how content
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Thanks to a suggestion from Brian Wasson, I used Storify this evening to compile a “story” of our shared learning today in Lewiston, Maine, at day 1 of the Google Geo-Teacher Institute. Using our event Twitter hashtag #gti2011, I ordered (more or less) most of the tweets shared by participants throughout the course of the
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Cross-posted to PlayingWithMedia.com. Last week I received a question, via Twitter from Rob Ackerman, about how I’m adding audio recordings to the new sound blog I created this month, “Sounds of my World.” To answer this question, I recorded a twelve minute screencast showing these steps on my MacBook Pro laptop. Before sharing the tools
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For the past couple years, I’ve been working with the scoutmaster of our Boy Scout troop in Oklahoma to get our website updated so it uses WordPress as a “content management system” instead of just using static webpages created with software like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. At long last, this afternoon, we had a meeting with
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Inspired by the Posterous-powered blog, “Life Sounds Like This,” by Australian Chinese-language educator Jess McCulloch, I’ve created a new blog: “Sounds of My World.” I’m using WordPress on a subdomain (sounds.speedofcreativity.org) of my main blog, and the free Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting plugin. I love the idea of having a “sound blog” for sharing ambient recordings
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For our “Digital Storytelling” cohort at the Learning 2.011 Conference in Shanghai this week, Sheldon Bradshaw and I wanted to create an interactive space for participants to share rich media. The easiest way to do this is via a free Posterous blog, configured for ANYONE to post to the blog using a shared email address.
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I spent four or five hours today helping a local non-profit group in Oklahoma City get access restored to their WordPress website. The site was hacked by a group apparently from Turkey. They were not able to login to the administrative “dashboard” of their WordPress site. Instead of a login screen, the following message in
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These are my notes from the August 29, 2011, OKC WordPress meetup. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. The div (thediv.org) is a nonprofit foundation created by iThemes to help train a local workforce in Edmond, OKlahoma for web development – this space is available for meet ups in tech – want to
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Please shed some light on this TwitPic mystery if you can. A month or so ago, my mom (who subscribes to my TwitPic account feed in her news reader) told me some strange photos were showing up in my stream. I tried to replicate what she was seeing and couldn’t. The strange photos were not
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Last fall when I taught “Computers in the Classroom” for pre-service education students at the University of North Texas, I used a blog on the site 21classes.com. (untcic.21classes.com) Since the free version of 21classes just permits teachers to have 10 student accounts (and I had 25 students) I opted at the time to pay $9
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