Last Sunday in our 6th grade class, students recorded an 81 second audio podcast about the theme, “Our Words are Powerful.” Since free accounts on AudioBoo.fm permit users to not only record audio using a web browser or smartphone, but also UPLOAD audio, I used it today to upload the audio from our 6th grade class. AudioBoo does not provide (as Cinch.fm does) a direct download link to the mp3 audio file for a specific Boo, however. To view and copy this link, I copied the RSS feed for my AudioBoo channel.

I pasted that link into my Safari web browser, which does a nice job handling RSS feeds and displaying them in a readable format. I then copied the direct mp3 audio file link.

I then created a new post on our 6th Grade Sunday School WordPress blog, and used special “short code” for embedding mp3 audio files in the HTML view of the post.

It would be nice if WordPress.com allowed the default AudioBoo embed code to work, as shown below, but for security reasons they don’t. On a self-hosted WordPress blog (like the one you’re reading right now) it’s possible to use this embed code, but not on WordPress.com. The WordPress.com site administrators have disabled some embed codes to “protect us” from malicious code, I think. Fortunately, this “short code” technique is pretty straightforward to use ONCE you have the direct URL to the mp3 audio file you’d like to use. There are other ways to do this too, but I like the short code method.

What other techniques do you use to embed audio on your blog?

Technorati Tags: audio, blog, wordpress, embed, mp3

Embed a MP3 Audio File in a WordPress.com Blog Post originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 8, 2012.

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, are MODERATED by Mrs. Callison. Students have not only been working on the quality and content of their own poetry, but also discussing “What makes a good comment?” Students are identifying specific elements of poems to highlight and providing constructive feedback to each other. Online, student publishing and interactive commenting moderated by a classroom teacher is one specific element of the new “Common Core” standards for Oklahoma students which Yukon Public Schools is currently working to implement at the direction of the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

One of the best things about students sharing their writing online using an open site like KidBlog is the opportunity it provides for parents to provide feedback, as well as teachers and students. Here is a specific example from Mrs. Callison’s 2nd hour, sixth grade English class this week.

This is a post written by Cooper last week, titled, “What is a Champion?”

Later in the day after Cooper wrote that post, Mrs. Callison shared some positive feedback as a comment on that post to accompany comments already moderated/approved. In addition, yesterday (January 31st) Cooper’s Dad logged on to the class website. He also wrote a comment, providing feedback and encouragement to his son.

It takes practice to get better at anything, and Yukon middle school students are improving their writing skills with digitally-saavy learning opportunities provided by Mrs. Callison. Kudos to Cooper for sharing his poem, and kudos to his classmates, Mrs. Callison, and Cooper’s dad for providing constructive feedback! We’re living in times of change, and it’s great to see this example of how Yukon Public School teachers are providing ways to extend learning experiences digitally beyond the “four walls of the classroom” and involve parents as partners in developing literacy skills.

Technorati Tags: kidblog, writing, blogging, poetry

Yukon 6th Grade Parents and Teachers Provide Students Feedback on Writing originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 1, 2012.

http://yesdancan.com is the website Dan Lovejoy built by hand (not with WordPress) to get a job – and he got a job!
- build websites with iThemesBuilder and focused a lot on SEO issues

Other web links for other attendees tonight:
http://www.northideas.com
http://extremevirtualsupport.com
http://www.tandswebdesign.com
http://www.edmondbootcamp.com
http://jfdoes.com
http://social-ism.biz
http://thereproject.com
http://thomasperezphotography.com
http://ignitedmediadesign.com
http://www.alertinternational.com
http://newlookmedia.com
http://www.gfellerstudio.com
http://www.heliumscraper.com (.net webpage screenscraper)

(if I missed your link and you attended please share it via a comment or Twitter)

“It’s tough to be a professional photographer today, because everyone is a photographer”

I shared a presentation on “Go Mobile with WordPress.” My links are on wfryer.me/wp

I also recorded my audio from this presentation using Cinch on my iPad

Now hearing from Dan Lovejoy on SEO and WordPress

Lots of important things to remember when writing for the web
- also important to write SEO (search engine optimized) content
- CRO = conversion rate optimization

Writing SEO copy is hard
- writing natural copy is hard
- writing conversation optimized copy is hard

SEO is optimizing your page or site for specific keywords
- standard line from web masters: if you just build it and write a lot of content on it, you’ll attract the traffic
- “being a content thought leader is a higher calling than SEO”
- there is a scientific process of optimizing specific pages for specific keywords

Avoid using a period in your phrase, but you can use a semicolon, comma, and m-dash or n-dash
- when you define SEO targets you generally want to use phrases rather than keywords
- “the longer the tail” you have using the Google Adwords tool, you can try to find keywords people aren’t ranking for but there is traffic
- you want to look for keywords in the 3 – 7% density (as of now) otherwise you can get ‘thumped’ by Google (Googe either puts a penalty on your page rank or de-indexes you)
- SEO has changed a lot even since November 2011 when I stopped doing this professionally

If you are already in the top six of Google search pages, you’re good
- people are drilling down in Google searches more now (we used to say you need to be on the top 3 pages)
- it is better to be 11 rather than 9…

David Christopher was Google SEO-guru at OPUBCO who taught Dan a LOT

My question about Bing: It looks like optimizing for Google does the same thing for Bing search

WordPress is a GREAT tool for SEO
- all the tools are available
- we use All-In-One SEO WordPress plugin

Post tips:
- make sure post titles contain keywords
- make sure post title propagates to your page title
- write a click-optimized custom page description for each (human readable URLs are very important to Google)
- the META KEYWORDS field doesn’t matter

Watch out for duplicate content, it won’t ‘kill you’ like it used to, but it can dilute the power of your inbound links

Key: cross-posting is bad for SEO, it can dilute the power of your inbound links
- if using Posterous site, set it up to be NO INDEX (change robots tags to tell Google not to look at the site)

Post titles should use an H1 tag on the title
- don’t use multiple H1 tags!
- if your theme doesn’t do this, you need to get a new theme or change it
- make sure you use semantic markup (H2, H3, etc) for internal headings
- use only absolutely necessary plug-ins (page speed matters)

Google indexes keywords that are higher on a page

Good SEO Blogs:
- http://www.seomoz.org
- http://www.stompernet.com

Google tracks how good your inbound links, Google knows what your PPC (pay per clicks) are, your keyword density, your interlinking….
- that is how Google knows about how long people stay on your site
- human reviewers also go to sites for Google (mainly checking for spam and garbage on your site)

Comment from attendee: Google doesn’t put a real person on a site unless it has more than 100,000 inbound links, they don’t care about sites with 10K or 20K links

Any time you have a person creating a real link, that is ‘white hat SEO’
- there is a sea of garbage that people create, that stuff is way down on Google results…

JC Pennys got ‘slapped’ really hard by using ‘black hat SEO’ methods

I HAD TO GO PICK UP MY SON FROM SCOUTS AT THIS POINT, SO I COULDN’T STAY FOR MORE… GREAT STUFF FROM DAN!

Technorati Tags: blog, mobile, wordpress, seo, plugin, plugins

Going Mobile with WordPress and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 30, 2012.

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 configuration specifics for these class blogs and a nine minute screencast in which I demonstrate each step. The teacher has six sections of students (136 in all) so the techniques described here for importing student userIDs and passwords from the district’s student information system can be HUGE time savers!

I am a big fan of free Posterous blogs for publishing student work, including media products. You’ll see multiple examples of student work shared on Posterous blogs on share.playingwithmedia.com, which I created to complement my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” KidBlog is a great platform too, but it has different advantages. Posterous makes the posting and sharing of rich-media files including images, audio and video very straightforward. KidBlog lends itself best to sharing text, but it can handle most kinds of embedded media. For the teacher I worked with today, as an English teacher it’s important her students have their own directory of posts they can readily view along with their parents. KidBlog automatically creates “student pages” of all posts an individual has published. (Usually in the right sidebar, but this can vary with the selected blog theme.) Other features of KidBlog I really like are:

1. It makes moderation of both posts and comments to a blog very easy / fast
2. It shows how many comments different posts have received on the homepage, so students as well as parents/other visitors can identify posts which “need some attention” and a helpful comment.
3. KidBlog is built on WordPress, so it supports the free WordPress iOS app. One of the 6th graders this morning asked, in fact, “Is there an app for this site?” I was pleased to tell her: Yes there is!
4. KidBlog supports “broadcast” posts, so a teacher can write a single post but have it automatically cross-post (“broadcast”) to all his/her blogs. This is HUGE for teachers using KidBlog with multiple sections.
5. It supports the importing of student userIDs and passwords as comma separated (CSV) files.
6. It supports nested commenting.
7. Students can change their own display name. This is important in our district, since student’s initial network userID is a series of numbers. For the teacher’s purposes, it’s important to identify students by first name. This is also critical for peer and parent commenting, and great the students can change these display names directly.

Today in two of the classes, students submitted over 100 different comments for their peers. Even though we coached students to “be thoughtful” in their comments and not just write things like “Good” or “Awesome,” of course we had some comments like that. About half the students in the first class today had used LightSpeed Systems’ free learning management system, “My Big Campus,” in other classes. Unlike My Big Campus, however, the KidBlog sites used today and I configured for the teacher are OPENLY visible to anyone online (without a login) but all posts as well as comments are moderated.

I recorded a nine minute screencast earlier in the week when I was configuring these student blogs, which shows all the steps I performed to each KidBlog site so it was ready for teacher-moderated posting and commenting today. I encourage you to check out KidBlog. More digital text / blogging platform options are linked on the “Text” page of playingwithmedia.com.

Technorati Tags: blog, kidblog, writing, configure, configuration

Configure KidBlog for Safe, Moderated, Interactive Student Blogging & Commenting originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 27, 2012.

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 this site in Google search results so people can identify YOU as the author
• Increasing the likelihood that when people search/Google for YOUR name, some of your ‘claimed’ web content on these sites will have high Google page rank and show up on the first page of search results

In this post I’ll explain how to do this.

If you have not already, create a free account on Google Plus.

Click on your name in Google Plus to show your profile and click EDIT PROFILE in the upper right corner. Then click on the right sidebar area titled, CONTRIBUTOR TO.

Type the title and paste the web links/URLs for websites you want to “virtually claim” on your Google+ profile.

According to Google’s Webmaster Tools help:

Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content.

While there is no guarantee this pilot initiative will eventually be fully embraced, I’d put my money on this program expanding. “Claiming your content” online using websites like about.me (about.me/wfryer) and ClaimID (claimid.com/wfryer) is an important part of crafting your digital footprint, and the Google+ Authorship program is a site which should be added to that list. If you’re publishing content on the open web, you likely want more people to find it. Google+ Authorship settings can help. Google Analytics Labs is also supporting metrics for content you claim which is indexed.

Technorati Tags: google, digital, footprint, search, author, authorship, claim, blog, site

Claim Your Online Content With Google+ Authorship Settings originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 10, 2012.

Using this helpful post from David Risley I figured out how to duplicate my “page.php” file and create an alternate page I named “nosidebar-page.php”. I uploaded that page into my theme directory and can now select it for a page on which I want to use it. I deleted the sidebar includes on the new page so they do not show up. The problem, however, is my content column is still just on the left side of the page and doesn’t overlap over the area where the two right sidebars were. The screenshot (of this current, ‘live’ page) below shows my situation and need.

I think I need help with the CSS: I need to add some CSS code to my “style.css” page so my new template can use those formatting directions and flow across those columns. I also need to remove the vertical lines in the page which separate the sidebars from the page/post body content. I used this tutorial this evening to briefly play with a child theme: I created one and activated it successfully, but all the previous customizations I’d added to the Permanent theme (including very detailed menus) were no longer available. So, I’m thinking I need some basic CSS advice here along with code to insert into my “nosidebar-page.php” template file. My current code in that page is included below. If you can offer suggestions / tips I’d love to hear them. Thanks!

WordPress CSS Help Needed originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 23, 2011.

The sixth grade Sunday School students I co-teach created a short, three minute “radio show” today in class using the free iPad app and service, Cinch. They recorded the five segments of “the show” using an iRig microphone. After class I published the audio recording to the Cinch website from the app, and visited the webpage it created for our new episode. Since we use WordPress.com for our class blog, however, the embed code for the episode can’t be directly used in a post. (I tried unsuccessfully.)

Instead of the Cinch-website provided embed code, I used this trick from the WordPress forums. I replaced the starting character for the code sequence with a forward bracket instead of a less than sign, replaced the word “embed” at the start of the code sequence with “gigya,” and deleted the ending “embed tag.” I also change the final greater than symbol to a closed bracket.

From a technical standpoint I’m not sure why this code change works with Cinch embed code, but it does! If you have a similar need to include embedded media on a WordPress.com blog post, hopefully this will help you too!

This is the original embed code suggested by Cinch.fm.
<embed src="http://cinch.fm/cinchplayerext.swf" flashvars="file=http:%2f%2fcinch.fm%2fcinchplaylist.aspx%3FRecordingID%3D316209&playermode=text&autostart=false&bufferlength=5&volume=80&callback=http://cinch.fm/flashplayercallback.aspx&width=300&height=200&volume=80&corner=rounded" menu="false" wmode="transparent" quality="high" name="316209" id="316209" width="300" height="200" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" allowScriptAccess="always"></embed>

This is the modified code I included in the edited post on WordPress.com.
[gigya src="http://cinch.fm/cinchplayerext.swf" flashvars="file=http:%2f%2fcinch.fm%2fcinchplaylist.aspx%3FRecordingID%3D316209&playermode=text&autostart=false&bufferlength=5&volume=80&callback=http://cinch.fm/flashplayercallback.aspx&width=300&height=200&volume=80&corner=rounded" menu="false" wmode="transparent" quality="high" name="316209" id="316209" width="300" height="200" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" allowScriptAccess="always">; ]

If you know other techniques for using embed code on WordPress.com, or have success with this method, please share your experiences in comments.

If you are using a self-hosted WordPress blog (your blog isn’t hosted on WordPress.com) you should be able to include unaltered embed code on posts when you use the HTML view and are logged in as a blog admin.

For more tips and techniques about creating media with students using digital text, images and audio, check out my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.”

Blogged on an iPad with WordPress for iOS. (free)

Embedding Flash Audio on WordPress.com with an iPad originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 20, 2011.

It’s easier, faster, and generally less expensive to simply create a subdomain for your website using CPanel when you want to make a secondary site like I did in this case. Since my main website is hosted by Posterous, however, I had to create this as an “add-on site” using my existing hosting account with Siteground. If you have questions, comments or suggestions related to this process I’d love to hear them and will do my best to answer them.

If your school or state high school technology curriculum does not include in-depth learning about WordPress and CPanel, it is in dire need of an update. From what I understand, that’s the case with our state-mandated Oklahoma Career Tech curriculum for technology classes taken by high school students.

Technorati Tags: cpanel, howto, video, website, wordpress, youtube, subdomain, hosting

Create a subdomain for a website as an add-on slot originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 14, 2011.

Each workshop will be offered in three versions:

• a 3 hour hands-on, BYOL (bring your own laptop) workshop held in Oklahoma City ($50 per participant*)
• a 1 hour, interactive videoconference for participants using Skype or a H.323 video endpoint ($100 per site*)
• a 60 minute, downloadable video podcast (99¢)

* Pricing is for credit card payments, an additional processing fee applies if paying via school purchase order.

Sessions include:

• Dec 1: Creating Multimedia eBooks
• Dec 2: iPhoneography
• Dec 5: Tell a Story in 5 Photos
• Dec 6: No-Edit Audio Podcasting
• Dec 7: iPad Quick Edit Videography
• Dec 9: Classroom Blogging
• Dec 12: Narrated Slideshows
• Dec 13: Classroom Radio Shows
• Dec 14: Puppet Videography
• Dec 19: Classroom Learning Portals
• Dec 20: iPad Media Creation
• Dec 21: Classroom Backchannels

Each face-to-face workshop will take place in Oklahoma City from 8:30 to 11:30 am. 15 seats are available for these sessions. Workshops are BYOL: Bring Your Own Laptop. Wifi connectivity and electrical power will be provided. Videoconferences will be held each day from 2-3 pm CST, and 4 different remote sites per workshop can attend. (The number of attendees at remote sites is up to event organizers.) Videoconferences will be bridged by Bluejeans Network, which permits simultaneous, disparate endpoints to participate in the same conference. This means you can connect whether you have a fancier H.323 videoconferencing endpoint from Tandberg, Polycom, LifeSize or another vendor… or you simply have a Skype connection via your laptop, desktop computer, or iPad.

All registrations for these workshops and videoconferences are via EventBrite. Videoconference session recordings will subsequently be available as 99¢ downloadable podcasts. Participation in videoconference sessions includes agreement/permission to record and commercially share the interactive session.

I hope you’ll plan to join in one or more of these December workshops, either in person in Oklahoma City or online via videoconferencing technologies. “Bring your device and we’ll meet in the cloud!”

The image above is also available as a downloadable PDF via Scribd, if you’d like to share this with others.

Join in 12 Days of Playing with Media originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 9, 2011.

Brian Shih, the original (and former) program manager for Google Reader, was on the money in his Halloween post, “Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?” Brian wrote very critically:

It’s almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don’t really get platforms. Instead of improving the G+ API to support Reader as a fully functional 3rd party client (a la Twitter), they’ve instead crippled the product under the guise of improvements.

I was under the impression, before reading updates Brian shared on his post, that the only “new” way to share a Google Reader article is now to click the “1+” button on the article. For those of us used to sharing our “read items” from Google Reader on our blogs, this seems useless since Google+ does not presently (that I could figure out) provide a way to share the “1+ links” via RSS or a widget like you could with the old Google Reader. Turns out, when viewing an article in Google Reader in your browser you can now click a SHARE button in the upper right corner of the screen. This will share the article directly in your Google+ feed, however, for everyone to see who follows you in the “circles” you select.

Where this was previously a one click process in the old Google Reader, now it’s a two click process. More than being a problem for doubling the number of required clicks, this is a problem for me because I don’t want to share every article I read in Google Reader to my G+ stream. I haven’t, in fact, figured out how I want to use G+. I like Twitter and Facebook is ok, but I really don’t want a 3rd social networking platform to which I need to pay attention. Google is not giving us a choice about this, however, if we’ve “digitally invested” (as I have) in other platforms like Google Reader.

I want the old functionality of Google Reader back: I want to be able to click on the SHARE button under an article, and then have that article added to an RSS feed of articles which I can share via my blog and elsewhere. I’m pleased to report tonight that while that “old Google Reader sharing” system isn’t supported anymore on the actual Google Reader website, it IS still supported by the underlying API and by applications which use it. It’s possible Google will shut that down at some point, but I hope they don’t! I like this previous method of sharing read articles and don’t want a functional downgrade! Here’s how this still works.

For the past few months, I’ve shifted most of my mobile news/blog reading to my iPhone application, “MobileRSS Free.” It’s free (as the name indicates) and integrates directly into your Google Reader account. This evening when I read a great post by Scott Floyd from a couple weeks ago when he attended a Project Based Learning workshop put on by a trainer for The Buck Institute, I clicked the SHARE button at the bottom of the article.

Just as it had prior to the “new” Google Reader / Google Plus changes, this mobile app button still worked! In the screenshot below of my current “shared articles” on Google Reader, you’ll see Scott’s post listed first as the most recent share.

After this success, I tested the app Flipboard on my iPad and confirmed its “share to Google Reader” functionality is (at least partly and for now) still working too. Articles you view on Flipboard which come from your Google Reader account can still be shared, and show up on the “old” Google Reader shares list.

Previously, however, (and I’m not sure when this changed) Flipboard allowed users to cross-post articles from other sources over to their Google Reader shares. This doesn’t appear to work anymore. I tried tonight to share a Facebook update over on Google Reader, and my Google Reader account (even though it’s entered and validated in Flipboard) wasn’t provided as it had been in the past as a sharing platform option.

Overall when it comes to the “new Google Reader,” I hope the design and programming team will listen to user feedback and make some changes. I “get” that Google wants us all to use Google Plus instead of Twitter. I’m not excited about that plan. There are some good things about Google Plus, but I am heavily invested in Twitter and find it a valuable network to use for LOTS of reasons. I’m not leaving Twitter, and I’m not going to invest comparable time in Google Plus (or Facebook for that matter) as I devote to Twitter on a regular basis. That said, I also LOVE Google Reader and consider myself “heavily invested” with my time and attention in that platform. One of the things I want to continue doing is being able to share out different articles that I read via my Google Reader subscriptions, and have those appear in my blog’s right sidebar. I don’t know how many people use these links and click on them because I share them, but from time to time I use the feed to find old articles. I do NOT want to share every article I read in my Google Plus feed. So, I’m glad apps like Mobile RSS Free and Flipboard provide ways to still enjoy “the old functionality” of Google Reader article sharing.

If you’re a Google Reader user, what do you think of the new changes? Have you figured out other ways to still share things you’re reading via Google Reader subscriptions instead of just sharing them in your main Google Plus feed?

If you’re interested, links to all the education blogs in my Google Reader “education” subscriptions are available. This is a link under “Resources” on my blog’s navigation bar. I’m glad the underlying code of “the old Google Reader” which supported that kind of subscrption sharing is still working too despite the “new updates.”

Technorati Tags: flipboard, google, literacy, mobile, plus, reader, reading, share, sharing, rss

Google Reader Post Sharing Still working with Mobile RSS originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 3, 2011.

Tannis Emann, a Canadien educator and @tmemann on Twitter, writes the blog “Aspiring to Higher Tech: My teaching journey in transformative times.” Her site is tannisteaches.wordpress.com. Earlier today, Tannis shared a post simply titled, “#authorspeak.” Tannis is using a WordPress theme which does NOT show the post author’s name or WordPress ID on each post. The About page of her blog clearly identifies the site as hers, but today’s post was confusing because of image attribution at the top of the post. As you can see in the laptop screenshot above and the iPhone screenshot below, since the attribution line does not say “Photo by Wesley Fryer” it appears the actual post was written by me. This was not the case and was both misleading and confusing.

Normally something like this might not get my attention, but Tannis’s post was tweeted with incorrect attribution to me by the person at the controls of the official @authorspeak2011 Twitter account. Since then it has been re-tweeted by at least 13 other Twitter users. These include edu-Twitterers Kyle Pace and Steven Anderson (@web20classroom) who have sizable educator followings.

I contacted Tannis via Twitter and she quickly made the change, using the text “Photo by Wesley Fryer” under the image.

This image attribution situation is something that can happen to anyone who is blogging, so it’s a good example to discuss and share with other digital writers. Here are a few lessons learned, please chime in with some of your own.

1. Model Proper Image Attribution: Kudos to Tannis Emann for properly attributing my image shared originally on Flickr via Creative Commons. Not only did Tannis properly attribute the image per the Flickr Community Guidelines (linking the original photo back to its Flickr page) she also included a text link for me as the photographer. The only ‘missing piece’ was the phrase, ‘Photo by’ in front of my name. Despite this initial oversight (which was quickly remedied) Tannis did a GREAT job with image attribution and sets a good example for all bloggers.
2. Twitter Can Amplify Conference Attendee Ideas Well: Kudos to Solution Tree and the organizers of the Author Speak conference for using Twitter. All educational conference events should use Twitter and a unique Twitter hashtag, and #authorspeak modeled that.
3. A Variety of Image Attribution Tools are Available for Bloggers: Tannis tweeted me today she’s using the image tool imagecodr to obtain and attribute Flickr Creative Commons images. I hadn’t heard of that tool previously. It looks great, except they need to add “Photo by” in their attribution. I shared with Tannis I like using Wylio.com for CC image location and attribution. It’s not free, but it’s not much and I LOVE their formatting for image attribution. Another option for self-hosted WordPress bloggers is the free PhotoDropper plugin. All of these are great tools to know about as a blogger. Images in posts are important because they can help get a potential audience’s attention as well as communicate more of the author’s ideas. Tools like these help streamline the process of properly using and attributing images in blog posts. These and other image sites/tools are linked on the “Images” page of PlayingWithMedia.com.
4. The Open Web is the best context for digital citizenship lessons: If Tannis had shared his post today on a closed website like Moodle or Blackboard, I wouldn’t be writing this post and we wouldn’t be having this opportunity to learn things about image attribution on blogs. I wrote an impassioned comment today on why “Moodle is not good enough” when it comes to digital writing and publishing student work. This situation shows how the OPEN WEB is a space where we need to writing and interacting as educators, and demonstrates why we need to publish on the open web with our students as well.
5. Twitter is a great tool for solving problems fast: Since Tannis and I were both online and monitoring Twitter this afternoon, this situation on her blog post was fixed within about 15 minutes. It’s very unlikely we’d have been able to have the conversation we did via email in such a short timespan. Twitter is a great communication platform, and should be unblocked on school networks. I know it’s blocked for many students as well as teachers, but we should not accept that situation. Today was a concrete example of how Twitter is and can be used to solve real problems through rapid communication.

Are there some other lessons to learn from this image attribution / tweetribution situation?

Here’s one more I’ll suggest: Even though I’m a self-published author, I think Solution Tree should invite me to AuthorSpeak2012.

Who IS the tweeter behind @authorspeak2011 anyway?!

Here’s the original image Tannis used, attributed via Wylio.

Technorati Tags: education, image, socialmedia, twitter, attribution, authorspeak

Lessons Learned from Image Attribution & Tweetribution Confusion originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 2, 2011.

These channels are “subscribable” using a YouTube account like a “normal” channel. This is a nice feature, and demonstrates how content published to the open web can be remixed, reorganized and redistributed in a variety of ways to communicate with a bigger (or in some cases more specific) audience.

I’m not sure how this YouTube referenced blog channel was setup or if it’s possible to “submit” a blog to become an aggregated video channel. Of course, I link to videos on Vimeo and other sites (like Celebrate Oklahoma Voices) from time to time, and those videos aren’t included here: just the YouTube ones. If you have any insights into how this works or how others can create similar YouTube video blog referenced aggregated channels (boy that’s a mouthful) please comment.

As a percentage, I wonder how many US schools permit teachers to access YouTube at school today? I wonder what the percentage is for student access at school? My unscientific perceptions tell me the numbers are growing, but slowly. We need more advocacy for balanced filtering, differentiated filtering, and campaigns focusing on digital citizenship in schools to change those numbers faster.

See resources for my August 2011 presentation in Montana on “Smart Networks” for more ideas along these lines.

Technorati Tags: block, blog, content, edtech, filtering, internet, learning, school, student, teacher, video, videos, youtube, aggregation, balanced

YouTube Aggregates Videos Shared on a Blog originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 29, 2011.

Technorati Tags: earth, edtech, google, gti2011, learning, maine, school, teacher, sketchup

A Google Geo-Teacher Learning Day Story: In Tweets originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 26, 2011.

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 I’m using to do this, I’ll point out (as I do in the screencast) a MUCH easier approach: Use email and a free Posterous.com website. That’s the method used by Australian educator Jess McCulloch on her sound blog, “Life Sounds Like This.”

The tools I’m using for this process (and describe in the screencast) include a WordPress blog, the free “Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting plugin” for WordPress, the free iTalk Recorder app for iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch, the PixelPipe iOS app uploading to Flickr, and free Switch software for audio conversions. Note the PixelPipe app was removed from the iTunes Store by Apple in 2010. Other apps and methods (described the in screencast) can be used to take a photo off an iPhone and share them as part of a blog post. Here’s the screencast!

Remember to check and and share examples of student media projects on share.playingwithmedia.com!

Note: I apologize for the “wind noise” in this recording. My foam windscreen for my headset microphone went missing awhile back when I loaned it to a student, and I haven’t replaced it yet. This screencast ended up being a lengthy saga to make tonight, because of some audio driver issues and needed updates in ScreenFlow. I ended up recording this five separate times, and published the 4th attempt because the 5th didn’t save properly. I’m relieved to have a finished version after spending MUCH more time than I’d planned making this recording. I hope it’s helpful to you, despite the distracting wind noise.

Technorati Tags: audio, blog, classroom, convert, edtech, learning, media, playing, playingwithmedia, share, sound, technology, conversion

Adding Audio to a WordPress Sound Blog originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 25, 2011.

1. Posting to the blog via email, using a free Posterous site we configured to “cross-post” directly to our WordPress site
2. Using a “contribute” form we created on our main website, using the free WordPress plugin TDO Mini Forms
3. Posting via the blog dashboard, using instructions from the WordPress Codex on writing posts.

When I was showing my son how to install and configure TDO Mini Forms to create this contribute form, I recorded an eight minute screencast describing these steps. If you need or want to configure a WordPress site to accept contributions from other people whose “draft posts” you want to moderate, these techniques and instructions may be helpful to you.

I created this screencast using ScreenFlow software.

Our website is far from perfect and we’ve got a lot of additional work to do, but at least the framework has been created now for the boys to regulary post new content online. They’ve set a goal of asking each scout serving as a troop webmaster (there are about five, I think) to post at least one new article to the blog each month. Our site is currently using the free WordPress theme Suffusion.

Do you have other ideas, techniques, or WordPress plugins you use to solicit contributor posts on a blog? I like the options to post via email or post via a web form because they are less complicated than posting via a unique userid and password on the site itself. Hopefully we’ll see lots of new content posted by our scouts in the weeks and months ahead!

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, collaboration, howto, post, posterous, team, wordpress, scout, tdo, forms, plugin

Streamlining Blog Post Submissions with TDO Forms on WordPress originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 18, 2011.

I love the idea of having a “sound blog” for sharing ambient recordings of unique sounds in our environments. Of the five I’ve posted so far from my trip to Shanghai this month, “Chinese Flute Music” is definitely my favorite.

I recorded those five audio snippets from Shanghai using the free iTalk Recorder app on my iPhone. I transferred these files over wifi from my iPhone to my computer using the free iTalk Sync application. Since the app records files in a relatively large, uncompressed AIFF file format, I converted the files to 64 kbps mp3 files (which are smaller) using free Switch software.

I uploaded each mp3 file directly to my WordPress site using the browser-based posting options, and copied the direct URL / link for each audio file to use with the PowerPress Podcasting plugin. The plugin creates a nice flash-based browser player for the audio files, and also provides a direct download link. The download link is useful if viewing the blog on an iOS device (iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch) which does not support Flash. I installed the free WP-Touch plugin to make the site more mobile-friendly.

In addition, I added a photo I took in each location where I recorded audio. I’m thinking this will enhance the value of these audio recordings if they’re used in the classroom, since they’ll provide some visual context for each recording. All content on the site is licensed under a permissive Creative Commons, attribution-only license, which means you and your students are free to use / remix any of this audio if desired for media projects.

Now I’ll just need to remember to record more audio when I’m “out and about” in interesting places. I’ve added Jess’ “Life Sounds Like This” sound blog as a new example on share.playingwithmedia.com, and added a new category under “Audio” for sound blogs. Remember if you share just ONE example of student-created media on share.playingwithmedia.com by September 30, 2011, you will be entered to win a free iRig microphone!

Consider starting your own audio blog! Audio recording technologies are one of the most UNDER utilized capabilities we have on our smartphones and computers. There’s lots to learn and share when we record ambient audio around us. Just be sure to get permission from others you record if anything which is said is personally identifiable or potentially a confidentiality issue.

Technorati Tags: audio, china, digital, digitalstorytelling, learning2, playingwithmedia, record, shanghai, storytelling, sound, sounds

Sounds of My World – My new sound blog originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 15, 2011.

Setting Up Mirrored Information Traps at SCIS by wfryer

I’ve added SoundCloud to the list of audio apps and browser-based services on the Audio page of PlayingWithMedia.com.

Technorati Tags: autopost, blog, crosspost, howto, podcast, posterous, wordpress, soundcloud

Mirroring a Cohort WordPress Blog with Posterous originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 8, 2011.

Here are the things I think they got WRONG setting up and maintaining their website. Perhaps you can avoid these in a similar situation, and/or encourage others to avoid them.

Inexperienced Developer
The non-profit leaders found someone who literally said “I’ve setup a WordPress site once before” and asked them to setup the site for their organization. This was mistake number one. Just because someone has setup a website with WordPress ONCE, they are neither an expert nor the best choice for your website developer. While their ONE successful WordPress setup may make them an “expert” in WordPress relative to you, if you don’t have any WordPress skills, you still should NOT entrust the future of your organization’s digital footprint to an inexperienced developer. Ask to see a portfolio of work for the websites the person you’re considering as a developer has created, and find out how much they’ve worked with WordPress. This is a challenging thing: Attempting to discern “expert knowledge” when you are not an expert yourself. I’m not aware of formal “WordPress certifications” you can look for on a resume. You definitely don’t want to go with someone who says, “Oh yeah, I’ve done that before one time.”

Setup via Fantastico
Fantastico is a speedy but highly insecure way to setup various content management system installations on a web hosting account, generally using CPanel. CPanel is what most hosting accounts use for management after you login to your web host’s site. While Fantastico can make the process of installing WordPress fast, it also (I’ve read and been told) isn’t as secure as an installation performed from scratch. This takes a bit longer, but from a security perspective is worth it. Ask your web developer, “How are you going to install WordPress on my site? Will you use Fantastico?” If they say yes, ask why. Then go look for a different developer. I know the kid who setup the site which got hacked, and I cleaned up today, used Fantastico for the WordPress installation because I saw the residual files which were left in the web directory by Fantastico. I can’t be sure, but I strongly suspect the INSECURE installation via Fantastico was at least in-part to blame for the hack.

Use a Secure Password
Secure passwords are one of the best defenses against hacks on websites or on web accounts of any flavor. Ideally, secure passwords should also be changed periodically. People don’t like to use secure passwords. These are passwords which are impossible to guess because they use a combination of special keyboard characters along with upper and lowercase letters, AND numbers. No one likes these passwords, but they are the ones we should and must use if we want to keep our sites from being hacked. Don’t use the same password on multiple sites, either.

Keep WordPress Up to Date
Like other software programs, WordPress is regularly “patched” to fix security holes and vulnerabilities. If you don’t update your WordPress installation, you’re vulnerable to hacks. I know for a fact this WordPress installation was out of date. That’s another red flag: If you don’t keep WordPress up to date, you’re asking for trouble and it may come in the form of a hack. Ryan Collins learned this lesson the hard way just this week. Learn from his lessons! Heed the lessons!

Avoid Site Updates on Public Wifi Networks
This final piece of advice is definitely on the conservative side, but it’s relevant since it can open you up to hacks as well. When you use a wifi hotspot at a coffee shop or other location which is not secured, you potentially open yourself up for other people connected to the same network to “sniff” packets being sent from your computer and use the information contained in them to hack your web accounts. The Firesheep extension to FireFox last year dramatically demonstrated this. WordPress installations don’t typically use or require a secure (https://) connection, so cookies which are “set” for site access can be grabbed on a shared public wifi network and used. See my post from November 2010, “Firesheep should get your ATTENTION: Open Public Wifi Dangers are REAL” for additional background. WordPress site access isn’t your only risk: Standard, unsecured FTP connections to your hosting server can also open you up for hacks. Avoid these updates on a public wifi network, or use a VPN “tunneling” service like Astrill to securely and privately use these web applications and programs.

Sometimes your site can be hacked and you may not ever figure out why or how it happened. My site (this blog) was hacked briefly in September 2008. Alan November’s WordPress site (main website) was hacked in July 2010. These things can and do happen. Hopefully, however, we all learn from our mistakes and resolve to avoid “high risk behavior” when it comes to website hacks.

Go forth and behave in secure ways online! (It might save a friend or acquaintance a few hours of work cleaning up the mess made by a bunch of Turkish hackers if you do!)

What pieces of WordPress security advice have I missed here? I’d love to hear additional suggestions on this topic.

Technorati Tags: advice, safety, wordpress, hack, security, installation, cpanel, fantastico

A Case Study: How NOT to Set Up a WordPress Site originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on September 2, 2011.

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 promote web-tech creativity and innovation
- grand opening was just last week
- Ruby on Rails group is meeting here next week
- this is a free, community-based space

Thursday is a co-working day: come in and co-work
- formula is simple: put good geeks in a room together and cool stuff is bound to bubble up

MY COMMENT: THIS IS VERY INTERESTING AND EXCITING. REMINDS ME OF THE “The Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative” BUT THE DIV IS COMMERCIALLY SPONSORED AND NOT AS FOCUSED ON CO-WORKING. GOAL OF FOSTERING A SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITY OF GEEKS / CODERS IS SIMILAR. GREAT TO SEE THIS IN OKC METRO AREA!

Some websites of attendees at tonight’s meet up (about 40 people here in all!)
- m1k3.net (website of Michael Dick, who among other projects designed the mobile website for Mashable.com – WOW!
- www.thefringepodcast.com
- www.jnzradio.com

1st topic tonight: iThemes Builder

presentation by Chris Jean, who has worked for iThemes for 3 years

Video overview

iThemes Builder from WebDesign.com on Vimeo.

Builder was developed because of customer requests to make tweaks/changes and especially specific requests for customizations in WordPress
- our initial effort was Flex to let people control more options/customizations
- Builder uses layouts

It’s hard to make a Buddypress compatible theme, so at this point Builder is not Buddypress-compatible

MY COMMENT: IT’S GREAT TO HAVE THE EXPERTISE OF THE iTHEMES GUYS LIKE CHRIS HERE. IT HAS FELT AT LEAST A FEW TIMES IN THE PAST (AND TONIGHT) LIKE THIS WORDPRESS MEETUP IS MORE OF A MARKETING OPPORTUNITY FOR iTHEMES THAN AN OPPORTUNITY FOR WORDPRESS USERS TO SHOW STUFF TO EACH OTHER…

Anyone who has attended a WordPress OKC meet up in the past should fill out our member survey, created by Lynn with Gravity Forms

Topic 2: Now hearing an overview of Backup Buddy
- lets you backup your WordPress installation to various spots in the cloud, including AmazonS3, DropBox, etc.

Video overview of BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy from WebDesign.com on Vimeo.

BackupBuddy includes a malware scan – SWEET!

Avoid free themes & plugins 4 #wordpress from hedgy / suspicious looking sites, malware is also distributed via downloads #wordpressOKC #fb

Many #wordpress malware instances come from PCs that have malware, when people use FTP, it injects malware into a theme

MY COMMENT: I’VE HEARD ABOUT BACKUPBUDDY MULTIPLE TIMES, SEEN IT DEMOED… I REALLY NEED TO BUY IT AND USE IT.

Topic #3 is Loop Buddy

but first: quick demo of WP Ajax Edit Comments (Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments)

Loop Buddy: “With LoopBuddy, you can modify the behavior and appearance of this Loop without touching a single line of code.”

MY COMMENT: UNFORTUNATELY I HAVE TO BAIL OUT A BIT EARLY TO PICK UP AT SCOUTS. GREAT MEETUP TONIGHT, I DEFINITELY NEED TO PAY AND USE BACKUPBUDDY! I’M EYEING THE DEVELOPER SUITE…

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, meetup, notes, okc, wordpress, wordpressokc

OKC WordPress User’s Group Meeting Notes: August 2011 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on August 29, 2011.

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 showing up on the webpage for my TwitPic account, just in my feed. A few weeks ago when I was back in Kansas, I helped her unsubscribe and re-subscribe to the feed. That seemed to remove the strangely appearing pics.

Today, however, I saw that a photo I DID NOT TAKE showed up in my TwitPic feed and auto-posted to my Facebook page. Thank goodness this wasn’t an inappropriate photo!

The questions are:

1. Who in the world is in this photo?
2. How did this photo get included in my TwitPic photo stream?
3. How can I stop this from happening again in the future?

For now, I’ve deleted this auto-crosspost authorization from my TwitterFeed account. That will stop these mysterious pics from showing up on my Facebook wall. It will not, however, stop these photos from showing up in my TwitPic photo stream. I didn’t have any luck looking for answers via Google or in the official TwitPic FAQ.

If you have ideas how to address this (in addition to changing my Twitter password) please let me know. I’m submitting this as a new TwitPic helpdesk ticket and will post the results of what I learn here in hopes it will help others who also run into this problem. I’m sure I can’t be the only TwitPic user facing this.

Technorati Tags:
photo, twitpic, twitter, mystery

Other People’s Photos Showing Up in my TwitPic Photo Stream originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on July 25, 2011.

As sometimes happens, I neglected to follow up on their reply and as a result have continued to be charged throughout the spring term for this blog service I wasn’t using any longer. This was definitely my fault, and something I should have remembered to take care of in January. I’m pleased to report, however, after contacting 21classes.com support again this week they have taken care of me. They refunded the charges for the months I was not using their service, and provided me with quick instructions to downgrade my account to a free version.

Many, many thanks to the support team at 21classes.com!

For more background about some of my “lessons learned” teaching pre-service education students and using (among other things) different blogging platforms, see my post, “Lessons Learned Teaching EdTech to PreService Education Students (Fall 2010.)” You also might want to check out the February 2011 posts, “Individual vs Team Blogs for PreService Edu Students (Comparing KidBlog & EduBlogs)” and “Why I Upgraded my EduBlogs Account.”

I was finalizing my chapter on “Digital Text” for my forthcoming ePUB eBook, “Playing With Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” last night. If you are not using a blog for interactive media sharing now with your students and others, you should definitely give it a try. There are more classroom blogging options available today than ever, and it’s wonderful to have a positive support experience like I had this week with 21classes.

photo © 2008 Edelman Digital Bootcamp | more info (via: Wylio)

Technorati Tags:
21classes, blog, education, student, students

Great customer service experience with 21classes.com originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 23, 2011.

I already share quite a few “digital breadcrumb” activities on my Friendfeed account: friendfeed.com/wfryer.

I wish Google Sites created an RSS feed for recent activity, like PBworks does, so I could add that feed as well. I’ve been using a free Google site I mapped to wiki.wesfryer.com for several years now to share handouts and my presentation / consulting schedule.

Trunk.ly is a very interesting ‘digital breadcrumb’ site which I discovered a few months ago, which can aggregate links you share on the social bookmarking site delicious.com, as well as Twitter and Facebook. I setup an account on trunk.ly/wfryer. I also have this site archive the articles I share on Google Reader as well as links I post to wfryer.posterous.com. I primarily use that Posterous site to archive good links which I can’t readily save to Diigo, which I use as my primary social bookmarking site. I have my Diigo set to cross-post to delicious.com/wfryer. Lots of iPad news apps include a ‘share to email’ option, so this makes a Posterous site (which uses email for posting content) ideal to use as an iPad idea archive.

Is all this “digital breadcrumb sharing” TOO MUCH? I’m not sure. I do know I frequently use these sites myself to find / rediscover links I found in the past. This is analogous to making these websites part of my “offboard brain.” By saving links to trusted websites, I know I can go back to them later and find them. This is a HUGE benefit of using social media websites like these. The fact that “digital breadcrumbs” of these virtual activities can be shared with others is a big bonus. I learn a TON every week from people I follow not only on Twitter, but also on Friendfeed and Google Reader. Currently on Google Reader “254 people are following me, I’m following 82 people.” I’m not sure what my stats are for Friendfeed. I actually don’t “maintain” my Friendfeed account much, but since I’ve set it to be my Google Chrome homepage I frequently will see a link there others have shared. In this way, Friendfeed is part of my browser ‘dashboard.”

How much “digital breadcrumb sharing” do you think is TOO MUCH?

photo © 2010 Rachel Davies | more info (via: Wylio)

What are you using as your “information dashboard” these days? I find sites like Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook, which can be funneled and redirected into other tools and channels like Flipboard, are the ones I find most valuable. I want to “digitally invest” my time in these tools. They are “powerful ingredients for blended learning!”

Technorati Tags:
digital, facebook, footprint, google, googlesites, posterous, share, sites, twitter, youtube, breadcrumbs, trunk.ly, delicious, pbworks

Sharing YouTube Activity Digital Breadcrumbs originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 22, 2011.

We can do something about it, and I did… I changed the embed code on the blog post so “related YouTube videos” are not included / shown after the initially embedded video plays. This is something I’ve known about for years, but forgot to address with this cross-posted YouTube video. This isn’t the “end of the world” for our WordPress-powered troop website or the cause of using social media with our Scouts, but it’s unfortunate this happened with the FIRST YouTube video we posted to the site. I’m sharing this in hopes you can utilize YouTube effectively with organizations and avoid this pitfall. I wrote about this on the Eyes Right blog back in December 2008, on the post “Dark side of YouTube Related Videos.” A few months later, Ken Pendergrass shared a few links (including this post) about disabling related videos. Since YouTube has continued to change/enhance their video embed code options, those instructions may or may not still work. Here’s what I did this week to “fix” this YouTube related video problem.

As you can see in the screenshot below, initially (following a cross-post from Posterous) ‘related videos’ from YouTube were displayed on our scout website after a visitor viewed the embedded video.

To obtain different embed code which does NOT include related videos, I visited the specific page of our video on YouTube (NOT viewing in the ‘channel view, but instead clicking the video’s title to bring up THAT video’s page on YouTube) and clicked SHARE, then EMBED. I made sure the checkbox next to “Show suggested videos when the video finishes” was NOT checked.

I copied that embed code, and replaced the original embed code on the blog post in WordPress. I noticed there is extra code (“?rel=0″) which specifies that related videos NOT be shown.

Now when a visitor to our scout website plays the YouTube video, afterwards NO OTHER VIDEOS are shown.

Problem fixed. We’ll need to remember this when cross-posting YouTube videos to the site in the future, however. This is also a potential discussion item with parents: Letting them know the default setting for shared / embedded YouTube videos is to include ‘related’ videos which YouTube specifies and we don’t control. It’s good in this case the ‘related videos’ were’t egregiously inappropriate. Still, they didn’t have anything to do with our Scout troop, and we don’t want them “representing us” online when people happen to visit our site.

Remember to avoid controversy when embedding YouTube videos by DISABLING related videos! Here’s to hoping you can avoid a similar situation in the future!

Technorati Tags:
embed, scouts, website, wordpress, youtbe, code

Avoid Controversial Related YouTube Videos When You Embed on a Blog #gct originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on June 22, 2011.

The in-app resolution is a lot better than the exported JPG versions, even at a larger resolution. Hopefully a PDF export will be more readable.

I’ve registered the domain playingwithmedia.com for the book project, and am going to move my current site at talkwithmedia.com over to it. This book and website will (hopefully) complement my BYOL session at ISTE 2011: Simple Ideas for Powerful Sharing.

Have you tried an iPad app for mind mapping and brainstorming? What is your favorite and why? I really like Popplet! The lite version is free, fully featured, and limited to just one file. The $5 full version lets users create multiple files.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Brainstorming PlayingWithMedia.com with Popplet originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 18, 2011.

An even easier option for soliciting contributor posts to a team blog, however, is available by using the free website Posterous.com. After creating an account and a free blog on Posterous, configure your site to “autopost” to a variety of different services. Then, you can simply send an email message to “post@mysite.posterous.com” (where “mysite” is the unique subdomain address you selected when you setup the site) and your email message will “magically” become a post both on your Posterous site AND the blog site you configure to accept auto-posts. You can also configure Posterous to auto-post to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites too.

This evening, at long last I got my son’s Boy Scout Troop website moved over to WordPress and configured a Posterous site to cross-post directly to it. We’re doing this so our patrol “webmasters” can directly post news and other items to our site easily, including (if desired) directly from their smartphones. Posterous can cross-post to many types of blogs. There were two important steps I learned this evening when configuring Posterous auto-posting to WordPress.

First of all, be sure to select ALL CONTRIBUTORS when configuring the autopost options in Posterous. Then, after adding each person’s email as CONTRIBUTORS to your Posterous blog, they will directly be able to post to your WordPress blog.

Secondly, be sure to use a WordPress ADMINISTRATOR account when you enter login credentials into Posterous for cross-posting. If you don’t (and use a WordPress user account with “author” or “contributor” permissions, for example) some of the rich media content from cross-posts may be “stripped out.” This can include YouTube video embeds, which will “auto-embed” from Posterous. This means you just need to add the direct link to the YouTube video on its own line in the email message, and Posterous will “magically” grab the YouTube embed code for your post.

I LOVE Posterous and think it’s a fantastic tool to have in our “digital tool belts” for sharing and publishing ideas. Hopefully the configuration steps I took today will empower our young scout “webmasters” to publish a lot of news and information in the months ahead!

If you have not yet tried cross-posting content to your blog via Posterous, I encourage you to give it a try. Particularly on the iPad, which has lots of apps with the option to “share via email,” the power to post/blog with an email message is a nice option to have. And it’s free with Posterous!

Technorati Tags:
autopost, blog, blogging, empower, posterous, wordpress, crosspost, scouts, scouting, webmaster

Configure Autoposting to a WordPress Blog from Emails via Posterous originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 9, 2011.

Podcast378: The EdReach Media Network – Empowering Educator Voices Worldwide originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 8, 2011.

EduBlogs blogs run on WordPress, and WordPress does not like / does not accept “iframe” embed codes for all user types. If you stay in “HTML mode,” don’t switch your dashboard post view to “Visual” model, AND are an “administrator” on the blog to which you’re posting, “iframe” code can work. For our class blog, however, to which all students are classified as “authors” rather than administrators, “iframe” embed code doesn’t work.

For this reason, when embedding rich media in a blog post you need to use alternate embed code which does not use the “iframe” syntax. On Screenr, when you view a completed screencast and want to embed it, do NOT click the SHARE link over the screencast itself. Instead, click GET EMBED CODE to the right of the screencast.

Next, click USE OLD EMBED CODE and copy the “non-iframe” version of the screencast embed code and copy it.

This is the code you’ll want to use on your WordPress blog, and it should work fine to embed your Screenr screencasts.

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogs, edublogs, screencast, screenr, t4t, wordpress, embed, iframe

Embedding “non-iframe” versions of Screenr Screencasts on WordPress originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on May 7, 2011.

To do this when logged into your WordPress dashboard with an administrator account, choose SETTINGS – WRITING. Then check the option for, “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically.”

After saving that setting, open the offending post (the post which you suspect has an open tag and is causing this problem) and make a minor change to it. In our case today, we inserted a space at the end of the post. Then click update. WordPress should automatically fix the open tag problem, and this should resolve the strange misbehaving sidebar issue.

Technorati Tags:
problem, wordpress, sidebar, error

Configure WordPress to auto-correct HTML nested tag errors originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 17, 2011.

In the following five minute screencast, I demonstrate this process. This requires several things:

• A free account on Twitterfeed
• An active Facebook account, which has admin / administrator rights over at least ONE Facebook page (this can be a page you created or someone else created and later made you an admin on)
• The web feed address of a blog you want to auto-update to the Facebook page

I cross-posted this Screencast to YouTube as well.

Hat tip to Dean Shareski for sharing Twitterfeed and it’s powerful capabilities a few months back!

photo © 2009 Franco Bouly | more info (via: Wylio)

Technorati Tags:
blog, facebook, howto, page, publish, screenr, tutorial, youtube, autopost, socialmedia

How to automatically publish blog posts to a Facebook page originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on April 10, 2011.

Our first session on plugins was shared by Lynn Dye.

Some good plugins for WordPress
- Akismet for Spam Control (note only personal sites are free, payment plans are available for non-personal sites)
- WordPress Backup: Backup Buddy

SEO
- Google XML Sitemaps
- WordPress All in One SEO Pack
- HeadSpace 2
- SEO Smart Links

Linking to yourself too much is considered a bad thing by Google and perhaps other search engines for indexing

Cool Plugins

- After the Deadline (checks spelling, style and grammar)
- Block Spam by Math
- ServerBuddy (tests server configuration and compatibility with themes / plugins
- WP Smush.it (reduce image file sizes)
- WP Touch (iOS optimized theme)

Other Resources
- 15 Best WordPress Plugins to use in 2011
- Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins
- iThemes has a number of free Plugins

photo © 2009 John Fischer | more info (via: Wylio)

(I shared a session on “Mobile Blogging to WordPress via Posterous, WordPress for iOS and BlogPress” – podcast audio coming!)
- I shared OnSwipe briefly too, a new theme in beta for iPad compatibility

Tim Priebe shared our last session (I HAD TO LEAVE EARLY AND MISSED ABOUT HALF OF THIS)

Fix Your Ugly Website: Minor Tweaks to Make Your Website Look Good
- text and fonts
- spacing
- colors
- graphics

Number of fonts
- rule of thumb: 2 (headlines and body text)

Link Colors:
- if you CAN use blue for links in your color scheme, design studies have shown it’s a good thing to do

Font Size
- 10 pixels is too small for reading generally
- 14 pixels is a good guidelines
- Google uses 13 pixels for their site descriptions on search results

Text and Background color
- use good contrast

Colors
- generally use 2-3 primary colors, but make sure they complement each other

Gradients
- only 1 or 2 gradients at a max
- cleaner look with fewer gradients

Great resources
hypergurl.com
- can enter hex code, and will generate color scheme around it

colorschemedesigner.com

DeGraeve.com creates a color scheme around a photo

Technorati Tags:
okc, wordpress, user, group, notes, tutorials, tricks, meetup

OKC WordPress Users’ Group March 2011 Meeting Notes originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 29, 2011.

You can click the provided link in the email to moderate the comment, visit your Posterous site (after you’ve logged in) and choose to either approve or delete the comment.

For more details about setting up a moderated blog on Posterous, see my post and eleven minute screencast, “Set Up a Moderated Class Blog on Posterous” from TalkwithMedia.com. Also check out my conference presentation resources, “Share Your Ideas: Platforms for Publishing” for additional links / ideas.

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, edtech, education, moderation, posterous, technology

Moderate comments on a Posterous Blog originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 22, 2011.

Feedburner is a free service, now owned by Google, which lets content producers put a web feed into their web service and use their provided “Feedburner feed” as a more extensible content feed to which others can subscribe. Feedburner offers several advantages over “normal” web feeds, including browser-compatibility (so feeds show up in browsers not configured to handle RSS feeds) and metrics indicating how many people are accessing and subscribing to your feed. Feedburner can create “chicklets” which content creators can display on websites to display numbers of feed subscribers. Although I’ve used Feedburner on my blog for years, I never activated a plug-in which forces all blog subscribers to use the Feedburner feed version, instead of the default WordPress feeds. I have been hesitant to do this because I wasn’t sure what would happen to others who had subscribed to WordPress feeds, and I want to make my content as accessible as possible. As a result, the Feedburner chicklets in my blog sidebar have never accurately reflected my blog subscribership.

There were two obvious signs my Feedburner feed had become “frozen” as of my February 18th post about the Heartland eLearning Conference. On my wesfryer.com homepage, I use embed code from Yahoo Pipes to display my recent blog posts.

As you can see in the screenshot below, prior to today’s troubleshooting this Yahoo Pipes embed code wasn’t displaying my most recent posts.

When someone clicked directly on my Feedburner blog feed, the most recent feeds were NOT being displayed there either.

To test if this was a WordPress or Feedburner problem, I accessed the direct WordPress-generated feed for my blog. This is simply websiteaddress.com/feed, in my case speedofcreativity.org/feed. That feed displayed my Feb 18th post as the most recent entry, so I knew the problem must be with WordPress and not Feedburner.

Before making changes to my WordPress installation, I created a MySQL database backup using PhpMyAdmin. I need to purchase and start using an automated backup solution like BuddyPress, but have not taken time to do that yet. After downloading my backup database, I made several updates and changes to my WordPress installation.

First, I updated three of my plug-ins for which updates were available. Sometimes out-of-date plugins can cause feed sync problems. I also updated my WordPress installation to the latest 3.1 version. Last of all, I performed some routine “mainenance” on my WordPress MySQL database by removing “overhead” from some of the tables. This is done with the “Repair Table” command in phpMyAdmin, and a process I detailed in the May 2009 post, “WordPress commenting restored thanks to phpMyAdmin table repair.”

I’m not sure which of these steps fixed my problem, but after making those changes my WordPress-generated feed started updating correctly. I used the Feedburner troubleshooting tools to “resync” my feed, and verified the public Feedburner address is now updating correctly.

I have needed to correct the display of an apostrophe as HTML code in the embedded version of my Yahoo pipe on my homepage for awhile. While fixing that, I made a few changes to my Yahoo pipe so it now combines my most recent tweets with recent posts from both speedofcreativity.org and storychasers.org. This is the new syntax of the pipe:

This is the output, which (thanks to a conditional filter I added in the pipe) removes duplicate Tweets from my stream for new blog posts.

The benefit of dealing with these kind of issues is customizability and control over content. Whether or not it’s worth it to you to have those benefits, and deal with troubleshooting issues when they crop up, is a key question to answer when deciding if you want to self-host a WordPress blog. For more resources and links related to blog platforms, see the “Text” page of the TalkWithMedia.com site as well as my “Share Your Ideas: Platforms for Publishing” wiki page.

Technorati Tags:
blog, wordpress, self-host, host, self, feedburner, troubleshoot, sync, problem, table, mysql, database, repair

Feedburner Feed and Yahoo Pipe Updated (no longer frozen on Feb 18th post) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 16, 2011.

There are lots of reasons people blog, but many of us do it for the joy of learning and sharing as intrinsically valuable activities. You may have noticed I don’t run any 3rd party ads on my site. My blog is not about ad revenue. It’s about learning, sharing, amplifying good ideas and interacting with others interested in discussing good ideas– usually related to education.

I think Bill paints bloggers and social media sharers with an overly-broad brush in his article. Bloggers are not a monolithic group, and we are certainly all NOT blog scraping pirates.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Kirby Pkwy,Memphis,United States

All bloggers are not scrape blog pirates originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 10, 2011.

Berlin’s blogs:
- http://berlinfang.blog.163.com/
- http://ni.oc.edu/
- http://occreativeminds.wordpress.com/

We have about 2000 students at Oklahoma Christian University
- I am from China originally, and I actually blog a lot as a sort of cultural anthropologist living here in Oklahoma

When I help people develop online courses, the faculty members are often fearful about losing the personal touch, losgin touch, and establishign their presence at a distance

Why do people blog?

Reference to “Pursued by the Government” movie originally in Chinese, translated

lots of times WordPress and Blogger are blocked in China
- that is why I self-host with a CHinese hosting service

Why blogs in the age of Twitter and Facebook?
- to me I feel 140 characters is hardly enough to express what I want to say, it’s good for sharing pointers to other places
- it’s ultimately not about the tools – it’s about our ideas and what we say

Blogger roles
- citizen journalist: West Virginia Mine Disaster example
- writer: “Nothing has happened unless bloggers are talking about it”
- teacher: “I learned…”
- Window: “Window to the world…”
- Lobbyist: “Workers’ Union Example (blog post I wrote comparing unions in the US and in China was republished in a magazine)

In China print media has had primarcy historically, but now things seem to be reversed
- people talk about things on blogs first

I try to use my words to change the world one person at a time

Blogging has changed my life
- articles
- columns
- books
- awards

I’ve had two book offers from my blog
- this is like writing a book backwards!

I have won two blog awards in China
- originally I thought it was scam

Most importantly: I make lots of friends with my blog

I use the sandwich method when writing: I don’t aways write directly

Blogs can be turned into podcasts
- you can turn text into speech
- Voki is an example
- I met a person in Beijing who has hired people to read my blog in Chinese into his podcasting service, and that is now available in iTunes

Blog is media
- it interacts with other kinds of media
- it spreads out to print media, TV news, etc
- this is the way things are happening in China now

Example: My post “Cook Your Way to the Chinese Mind” was picked up and made into a magazine article, and then went onto TV

Most read posts:
- Too close vs too clear (200,730 views, 676 comments)
- Pre-marital questions (106,018 views, 174 comments)
- more…

1st post about family relationships and family dynamics (sorts of questions pastors and counselors use when talking with engaged couples)

Implications for online discussion: What drives people to a discussion?
- story: one ounce of story is worth a ton of argument
- familiarity: if people know you well, they will read more
- relevance: if this is something they can relate to, they will come
- practicality: if this is something useful, they will come
- curiosity: if this is something they want to know about, they’ll come

An oversimplified chart of American Inter-generational relationships
- made Chinese version, very complicated by comparision

Not all posts being read the most are being commented on
- “After Lu Xun, can we have Lin Yutang” (61,390 views, 924 comments)
- reference to Lu Xun who is in all our textbooks as a revolutionary author
- China is having a debate about whether his articles should be removed from textbooks

“Guo Jingming” – was in NPR story saying he doesn’t care about politics (post has 45,468 views, 914 comments)

In the evenings Berlin translates lots of books, and when he gets tired he’ll sometimes write a blog post as a break– that really helps!

Why would a reader participate in a blog / online discussion?
- Duck effect: dull arguments are not conducive to discussions, duck v portfolio
- watchdog effect: people are on guard for errors, ‘the masses’ eyes are now snow-bright / razor sharp
- dragonfly effect: reader cannot tolerate incongruity
- safety valve effect: readers feel rather safe to comment if you create a non-threatening environment
- my turf effect: everybody is an expert at something
- “I’ve got to say something” – there are those readers who are determined to say something, anything

Book: “Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers As the Fifth Estate” by Stephen D. Cooper”
- now the bloggers are watching

Portrait of an Engaged Learner
- I asked students to write about words which describe an engaged learner

see “What does student engagement mean to you?” post

Another interesting post and cross-cultural comparison: Forks and Chopsticks

Post about movie: Tender Mercies

Post: Hey couples, talk your way to bliss

Power of a good controversy: Tiger Mom (from Yale Univ)
- book: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
- I was commissioned to write an article about this
- “Tiger Mom Method can wait”

Passion is what matters
- it’s easy to get a lively discussion going if passionate people are involved
- Dr Stangelove quotation: “I reckon you won’t…

Catalyze Passion: Guy Kawasaki, “The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything”
- you have to make use of your passion
- your goal is to catalyze passion: pro or anti

To design controversey, you need to have a good story
- instead of using an argument, try starting your discussion with a story, anecdote, or quoteation
- purpose: not just for the “eye ball” (not just to drive traffic)
- participation: monitor if someone is ‘off the mark’
- saturation: close your arguments when you have gathered all possible important angles

Advice for managing blog:
- keep design simple and straightforward
- use multiple channels for promotion
- write with your grandma in mind
- blog to change the world, one reader at a time
- share your expertise
- find the right start
- do not worry about fame (focus on high quality posts and ideas)
- respect the media

MY THOUGHTS: I THINK THIS IS A GREAT SET OF RECOMMENDATIONS!

I’ve been blogging a little less than two years, I now have about 6.8 million page views – that is like a small newspaper

Lessons learned
- write offline and save often
- write as if you are going to publish it
- be yourself: but do not behave like a geek
- don’t post things you will regret

Last: Try not to get yourself fired!

A call to action: Start a blog!

Technorati Tags:
#heartlandconf11, blog, blogging, berlin, fang, boil, ocean

How to Boil the Ocean: Lessons of Blogging for Online Discussions by @berlinf #heartlandconf11 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on March 8, 2011.

WordPress User’s Group 28 Feb 2011

Video streaming by Ustream

Lynn Dye extremevirtualsupport.com

Resources for WP by Lynn

wordpress.tv started about 8 months ago Wordcamp TV
Wordcamp Central
lorelle.wordpress.com
wphacks.com

Podcasts
WP Weekly – www.wptavern.com
WordPress Podcast: wp-community.org – WordPress Podcast
wpcandy.com
dawpshow.com

Woothemes wooville 5 where’s woo – cartoon of premium WP theme options

New WordPress Bible is new, good book that came out in last 6 months

Now hearing from Tim Priebe about the WordPress dashboard

You can customize the blog posts which show up in your WP dashboard to show a different blog’s RSS feed (default is the official WP blog)

3.0 version includes new theme menus, you can use the custom menu widget to still display custom menus

Always edit a local copy of theme and widget files, make a backup first

Plugins to try – All in one SEO Pack
- Flexi Pages Widget
- Syntaxhighlighter evolved
- WordPress Mobile Pack
- WP Simple Paypal Shopping Cart
- WP Smush.it
- WP SIFR
- Shockingly Big IE6 Warning
- Theme My Login
- Incarnate
- Shadowbox JS

Yslow plugin for Firebug is good (for FireFox)

Shopp is Tim’s favorite plugin for PayPal on WordPress now

Tim uses Gravity Forms, but also still likes and uses Contact Form 7.

Tim recommends BackupBuddy over default WP import / export menus

Netbeans is a cross platform code editor that is great
- Francis Tuttle uses this for their student web design classes
- on windows it does have memory leak issues so you have to restart more often

WP does now support nested comments but your theme must support it

Under media options you can choose to make YouTube videos auto-embed

(I had to leave a little early to pick up for Boy Scouts)

Sent from my iPhone – originally blogged with the Notes app, links and video embed code added later with MarsEdit

Posted via email from wesley fryer’s posterous

#wordpress user group 28 Feb 2011 Notes originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 28, 2011.

In the sometimes profanity-laced blog, which has since been taken down, Munroe writes, “My students are out of control. They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

In her live interview yesterday for Good Morning America on ABC, Natalie claimed she never expected her blog would be available for “mass-consumption” and she never imagined others would see it besides her friend who initially encouraged her to start blogging about teaching. She also claimed the statements she made on the blog, like “There’s no other way to say this. I hate your kid” were ‘caricatures’ and not about specific children. Natalie is a parent herself with one child currently, and is expecting the birth of her second child soon. She didn’t have a very cogent response to Robin Roberts’ question, “How would reading those things make you feel as a parent?”

Steve Rovner, Natalie’s attorney, stated in the interview:

There’s no Internet policy at her school district. She was free to write and she was free to express herself; it was like a personal diary. She didn’t do anything wrong – some people don’t like what they have to write, but she’s being censored for what she wrote. Until the school district decides what to do with her, her life is in limbo.

The video on ABC News which auto-played following this one about Natalie Munroe was, “Teacher Suspended for Locking Student in Cage.” As a professional educator, it’s more than a little depressing to see mainstream media outlets focusing on these outlier, worst examples of teacher professionalism. In an era when the profession of teaching itself is under assault from various fronts, I believe it’s incumbent upon us as professional educators to take a more proactive role in telling the GOOD stories of learning and positive impact which are happening in our schools every day. That’s part of my motivation to continue facilitating Storychaser projects. Mainstream media loves a scandal, but we shouldn’t allow scandals like these to color and define public perceptions about education, about teachers, and about our profession.

Teaching IS hard work, and the students as well a situations in which many teachers work ARE challenging beyond the imagination of many others in different settings. Unfortunately, the hateful and profane ways in which Natalie Munroe chose to express her frustrations about her students were not constructive. We DO need to assist, rather than attack, teachers in our classrooms who face not only academic challenges but also the frequently overwhelming challenges of generational poverty. The frustrated, anguished voice of Natalie is not an anomaly in many of our schools. Her choice to verbally lash out directly against students, however, is not defensible.

Natalie Munroe, like many younger students who we often hear berated in the media for their lack of thoughtful judgement and responsible choices, made a bad decision to post her private thoughts on a PUBLIC blog about her students, her school leaders and her teaching situation. Did she have a right to share those things under the 1st amendment of the US Constitution? Yes she did. Will her decision to share those ideas publicly have negative consequences for her as an educational professional, and possibly more broadly for the education profession as citizens around the country shake their heads and say things like, “There’s just another example of why our schools are broke and teachers are bad?” Sadly, I think this answer is likely to be YES.

Karen Montgomery and I spent an hour and a half in January sharing ideas with educators in Amarillo, Texas, about the need for social media guidelines in schools. Our slides are available as a public Google presentation.

If we work together with others in our communities, “good” CAN come from conversations over the Natalie Munroe blogging situation. One example is included in the Montgomery Media article previously cited, about Springfield (Montco) schools in Pennsylvania.

“To be honest, we can’t say, ‘Don’t be on Facebook,’” Springfield Township School District Technology Director Kristin Swanson said Wednesday. “What we’re trying to communicate with teachers is what they do affects their image as an educator.” Swanson has been working with a group of teachers since December to revise the district’s employee technology acceptable use policy to address social media. The revised wording, which Swanson plans to present to the school board’s next policy committee meeting, includes the following: “The School District encourages teachers to hone their digital presence. Teachers must model appropriate and creative digital citizenship as they navigate ever-changing digital landscapes. Experimentation, evaluation, and synthesis in these environments are expected … Make an online presence for yourself using social media that showcases your teaching craft,” the proposed revision continues. “You can do this in many ways. Be creative and be aware that your image on social media affects your school career whether you use it for personal or professional reasons.” “We don’t want to hold teachers back, but at the same time we want them to be responsible and they have echoed back with nothing but responsible behavior,” Swanson said.

These words from Kristin Swanson are reasoned, balanced, and wise. Hopefully ideas like HERS can be amplified over the din of anger fomented by the irresponsible blogging of Natalie Munroe. Karen and I created the Facebook Group, “Social Media Guidelines for Educators” for the explicit purpose of sharing best-practice examples and ideas like these.

As a final note, old posts on Natalie Munroe’s blog have been taken down, and a lone post from February 12, 2011, remains public. The site is natalieshandbasket.blogspot.com. As of this writing, at least one cached version of an older blog post is still available via Google’s caching feature. Cached versions include her post from Thursday, January 21, 2010, titled, “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say…”

That blog post does NOT reflect the perspective, attitude, and disposition of an adult who should be an educator in the classroom of any school in the world. The words are hateful and profane. The comments there, which include some from Munroe’s former students, reflect the anger and hurt which her virtual words wrought.

Never forget how powerful words can be. Like many people today (including myself at times) Natalie Munroe did not appear to “think carefully before she posted.” This should serve as a warning to us all, regardless of our age or context.

Instead of lamenting the advent of blogging and social media, Central Bucks School District leaders and parents should instead THANK Blogger.com and the transparency it affords in situations like these. It’s unfortunate the case of Natalie Munroe has become a national conversation, but it’s wonderful her attitudes and self-professed beliefs about the children (at least some of them) entrusted to her care have been digitally and publicly archived for all to see. This type of documentation is not always available when the professionalism of educators and other public servants is called into question. Hopefully district officials will be able to constructively utilize it to take appropriate action, and Natalie can find a new career in which she’ll be able to discover joy as well as personal fulfillment. Education and classroom teaching was apparently not her calling.

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, ethics, teacher, teaching, natalie, monroe, pennsylvania, legal, lawsuit

Teacher Blog Controversy in Pennsylvania Points to Need for Social Media Guidelines originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 17, 2011.

Afterwards, not only was the banner advertising removed, but also those extremely irritating and unwanted in-post hyperlinks.

Maybe this is something that EduBlogs has been doing for awhile on their free accounts, I’m not sure. I was prepared to put up with banner ads on a free account, but I absolutely couldn’t stand to have words hyperlinked on my students’ posts by the advertising scheme EduBlogs is running. Teaching my students to intentionally and judiciously hyperlink is one of the important skills I hope to help them develop this term. Having auto-inserted advertising links on their words struck me tonight as an affront. I know some of the readers of my blog are EduBlog fans, and I’m very appreciative of all the advocacy work EduBlogs does for the cause of educational blogging. I’m glad they’re finding a way to monetize their business model. I really object to this kind of in-line, in-post hyperlinked advertising, however… and on the basis of my aversion to that kind of advertising don’t plan to use a free EduBlogs site again for a class I teach.

Hopefully EduBlogs will consider removing this kind of intrusive advertising on free blogs. Does anyone else find this kind of linked advertising an affront? I guess the reason I feel so strongly about it is because I intentionally hyperlink with care when I write posts. It’s part of the “best practices” for effective blogging, IMHO. Having an automated advertising scheme make my words, or the words of my students, into ad hyperlinks feels much more like having an unpleasant vegetable force-fed down my throat than simply tolerating a sidebar, header, or footer banner ad. It’s more than I can take.

photo © 2007 stallio | more info (via: Wylio)

On the positive side, upgrading to an EduBlogs pro account did allow me access to their “premium” themes, so I was able to activate the Regulus WordPress theme. I like it better than my previous choice for several reasons, but a primary one is that it shows the post author with each post. That’s important on a class / team blog.

21classes has changed their pricing model since last fall. I was on a monthly paid plan, as I recall they didn’t have a free option. Now they do, and it’s ad free.

For resources and suggestions (including blog platform options) for class blogging, see the “text” page of TalkWithMedia.com. Those include the post from earlier this month, “Individual vs Team Blogs for PreService Edu Students (Comparing KidBlog & EduBlogs.)”

Technorati Tags:
blog, edublogs, education, kidblog, preservice, school, technology, unt, wordpress, blogs, upgrade, pro, uco

Why I Upgraded my EduBlogs Account originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 15, 2011.

If you have questions or comments on the strategies or ideas shared in this screencast, please let me know! I made this screencast with Screenflow software and posted the HD version directly to YouTube from the program. Learn more about sharing text, images, audio and video safely to the web on my new book and website project, TalkWithMedia.com. (Incidentally, that’s a website I’ve created with Posterous!)

Technorati Tags:
blog, edtech, email, posterous, school, share, moderate, moderation, submit

Set Up a Moderated Class Blog on Posterous originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 13, 2011.

A variety of options are available for classroom blogging, and I’ve linked several of these on the “Text” page of the TalkWithMedia.com website. In Spring 2009, I had my approximately 45 students in two sections of “Technology for Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma set up their own, personal blogs on Blogger.com. I tried to aggregate student blogs in several ways so students could “find” each other and comment on peer blogs. These methods included creating a “Google Reader bundle” of our blogs (to which students could readily subscribe) and also creating a NetVibes portal for our class. Dr. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University uses a Netvibes site as a “project basecamp” for his students. (If you haven’t seen his announcement for this semester’s #VOST2011 project, take a few minutes to view his introductory video. Wow.) For my students last Spring, they did a great job with their Blogger sites but found it frustrating that they couldn’t readily “find each other” in the blogosphere, even with the Netvibes and Google Reader resources I provided.

To remedy that shortcoming, last fall when I taught “Computers in the Classroom” at the University of North Texas for pre-service teachers, I decided to utilize a class blog (as a “team blog”) instead of having students setup individual blogs. This proved to be a GREAT decision, from the standpoint of everyone in our class being able to more readily “find” and comment on peer posts. I setup our class blog on the website 21classes.com, which unfortunately was NOT free. I paid $7 per month for the account. It worked ok, but for some reason it was not compatible for video embedding with Internet Explorer on Windows. FireFox, Safari, and Chrome worked fine, but not IE. (This provided a very practical reason to encourage my students to ditch IE and embrace an alternative web browser.) I definitely want to encourage my students to continue blogging on their own following our class, but I found the benefits of “blogging together in a shared space” with a class/team blog outweighed the potential benefits of having students setup individual blogs initially for our class.

This Spring semester I’m again teaching two sections of “Technology for Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma. I’m using class/team blogs for each class, but to learn the benefits as well as drawbacks of using different tools we’re using Kidblog.com for one class and EduBlogs for another. Four weeks into the semester, we have 67 published posts and 75 comments on our KidBlog site, and 60 posts with 67 comments on the EduBlog site. (Each section has a different blog.) These are a few of the differences I’ve noticed so far between KidBlog and Edublogs:

1. Password management works differently on both sites. For KidBlog, I can’t enter an email address for my students, so they can’t recover their own account password via email. They also can’t readily change their passwords, but I can as the teacher / site administrator. In class the second week I ended up letting all my students temporarily become admins on the site so they could change their passwords, but that’s not a workable solution for a K-12 student class blog. Edublogs lets students individually manage their accounts and change their passwords, as well as use an email address for password recovery.
2. KidBlogs automatically creates ‘contributor’ links to everyone’s blog posts on our site. The themes available on the free EduBlogs sites don’t offer this feature. (Or I haven’t found it yet.) I’ve started to create a contributor list on our blog using the WordPress “blogroll” link option, but it’s unnecessarily time consuming to have to do this manually.
3. The homepage of KidBlog is great for a class/team blog, since it shows the titles of the most recent 25 posts. The EduBlogs WordPress theme options for a free account can’t do this. Recent posts can be shown as a sidebar widget, but I really like the KidBlog homepage interface better. I also like how it shows comments on different posts, making it easy to identify recent posts which haven’t received comments yet.
4. EduBlogs lets users create their OWN blogs, in addition to joining a class/team blog like the one we are using. This isn’t a readily-available option for KidBlog. Several of my students have been confused by this and initially posted on their OWN EduBlogs site rather than posting to our class EduBlog site. We’ve worked through these issues, but these problems didn’t happen with my section using KidBlog.
5. KidBlog has native support for posting via a 3rd party blogging client like Mars Edit which uses XML-RPC. EduBlogs doesn’t support this on their free version, you have to pay and upgrade to the “pro” version to use this feature. This isn’t something any of my students probably care about, but since I compose 99% of all my blog posts in Mars Edit (including this one) it’s an important feature to me.
6. I find the presence of “pro version” options/links on my free EduBlogs site which are not available on the free version a bit irritating. I understand EduBlogs wants to show these as an enticement for the “Pro” upgrade, but I’d rather not have them as part of my dashboard if the options are not available. I realize complaining about this is like a homeless person complaining that the free lunch they are eating isn’t hot enough. I’m thankful EduBlogs does provide a free blog option, and I know the monetization scheme they are using is very positive since it will hopefully ensure their continued financial solvency / existence in the future. (Like VoiceThread.com.) I still feel compelled to mention this in a comparative review, however. The cleaner interface of Kidblog (which provides all available functionality free) feels better to me at this point than the free EduBlogs version.
7. There are not ANY ads on Kidblog sites. Free EduBlogs sites have ads.

One of the most important skills I’m hoping my students will learn this semester is how to effectively write blog posts with hyperlinks and embedded media. Today we had an “open lab” meeting for Q&A with students in both my sections, and I created / recorded the following two screencasts during our discussions to review the processes for linking and embedding videos on both KidBlog and EduBlogs.

This screencast demonstrates how to create a link and embed a video in a post on a Kidblog site. Run time is 11.5 minutes.

This second screencast demonstrates how to create a link and embed a video in a post on a free EduBlogs site. Run time is 8.5 minutes.

I shared both of these screencasts on my T4T Class FAQ blog. (On Blogger)

If I hadn’t been recording these screencasts with students I probably could have made them both shorter and more concise. At is was, however, having a screenrecorder available (Screenflow for Mac – a GREAT $99 software product) made it easy to record these on the fly. Afterwards, I did minor post-production editing adding some video effect zooms as appropriate. I LOVE using Screenflow when it doesn’t make sense or isn’t practical (as it wasn’t today) to use Screenr.

One of the reasons provided by EduBlogs for upgrading to a paid/pro account is to embed videos in posts. When you use the VISUAL post view, “iframe” tags for video embeds are stripped out on free EduBlog sites. If you stay in the “HTML” view, however, and publish your post from the HTML view without going to the VISUAL view, embedded videos like those shown above CAN be posted with a free EduBlog site. This is NOT as user-friendly as the GUI tools available for embedding video on Pro accounts, but it does work. This is the method I’ve taught my students to use in “Technology 4 Teachers” this semester.

EduBlogs runs a modified version of the multi-user version of WordPress, and embedding rich media content can be tricky with WordPress. I’m not sure if more recent versions of WordPress have changed this requirement, but at one point users had to disable the default visual post editor in their profile to be able to post embed code. I’m delighted it’s possible to still embed videos in a free EduBlogs site, since I consider this a “core competency” for hyperlinked writing and I want to let me students EXPERIENCE the powerful things which can be done with free blogging tools this semester.

If you work with pre-service education students or are a pre-service education student, what are your views about class blogs versus individual student blogs? If you’re a classroom teacher, which option do you prefer for students at the grade/level(s) you teach? Both options have benefits as well as drawbacks. Do you have a favorite blogging platform for a class/team blog? Is that answer different if the blogging students are pre-service education students?

Technorati Tags:
blog, edtech, education, team, technology, wordpress, preservice, kidblog, edublog, edublogs, 21classes, web2, literacy, howto, tutorial

Individual vs Team Blogs for PreService Edu Students (Comparing KidBlog & EduBlogs) originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 4, 2011.

A: I created a 4 minute screencast answering this question. The links I referenced are Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Online Search, Wylio.com, Compfight.com, and TalkWithMedia.com’s Images page.

Cross-posted to the T4T Course FAQ and TalkWithMedia.com.

Technorati Tags:
blog, images, image, creative, commons, creativecommons, post

Creative Commons licensed images in blog posts originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on February 1, 2011.

We are meeting at iThemes tonight, which is an Edmond-based company specializing in WordPress theme design and website development. Our meeting tonight is being live-streamed on ithemes.tv. They have a regular webshow every Tuesday morning at 11 am CST. Matt Danner posted a cool panorama photo of our meeting room tonight (just before I arrived, I’m now in the empty chair in the back of the room!) on Occipital with Augmented Panorama. This is the TwitPic version.

We are working on putting a WordCamp on in Oklahoma City. Cory Miller is the founder of iThemes and he attended Wordcamp Phoenix recently. WordCamps are great places for learning and networking
- example I use: If my mom can use WordPress, YOU can use WordPress

iThemes developers have met the core developers of WordPress and contributed code back to the main WordPress code base

Now hearing from Dustin Bolton giving a demo of the free Plug-In, Loop Buddy.
- familiar with the WordPress loop?
- we will be releasing this as a free plug-in soon
- Loop Buddy provides a WYSIWYG interface for changing the contents of the WordPress loop (don’t have to write/change pHp code to make many kinds of modifications
- query editor lets you modify which posts are shown on a page (similar to using the ‘smart playlist’ feature in iTunes to create custom and dynamic playlists)
- This Loop Buddy is part of our ‘giving back’ to the WordPress community

MY COMMENT: I’M THINKING I SHOULD OFFER TO SHARE AT AN UPCOMING MEETING ABOUT HOW WORDPRESS HAS BEEN A VITAL PART OF THE K-12 ONLINE CONFERENCE FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS…

Chris Jean: it has (to date) been impossible for a plug-in to put content into a theme
- widgets were first a WP plugin, and eventually they were integrated into the main WordPress codebase (in the core)
- Loop Buddy has been developed to make this kind of theme tweaking possible and easy for WP users

I’M THINKING IT WOULD BE FUN TO BRING ALEXANDER’S SCOUT TROOP HERE TO A MEETING AS A FIELD TRIP… GOOD WAY TO LEARN HOW WEBSITE DEVELOPERS / TECHNOLOGY GEEKS ARE WORKING, NETWORKING, AND LEARNING TODAY…

It looks to me like Loop Buddy will give “normal” WordPress users (not just developers) power to do a lot more customization of how the content already included in the “WordPress Loop”

Now discussing Backup Buddy:
- iThemes created this as a result of their own web server crash experiences: A holistic WordPress backup strategy was needed (it is now a premium plugin offering)

iThemes offers a variety of free WordPress themes, including:
- ContactBuddy (A customizable contact form solution for WordPress sites simpler in many ways according to Chris Jean to Contact Form 7, which is what I currently use on several sites)
- ServerBuddy (tests server configuration to look for problems with hosting configuration and determine compatibility with various WordPress themes and plugins)
- Tabber Widget (simple-to-use editor to create tabbed widgets)
- ThemeMan (Theme Manager, adds a drop-down list to the Themes page in the WordPress administrator Dashboard allowing you to rapidly preview or activate different themes on your site)
- PB-Tweet (easily display your latest tweet in an easily customizable banner at the top of your website)
- more

Script timeout limitations on some sites (like GoDaddy) are just 30 seconds, that’s not enough time to backup large websites. BackUpBuddy was developed to address this and other challenges.
- backup with Backup Buddy doesn’t include images currently
- Backup buddy launched in March 2010

IT SOUNDS LIKE MANY OF THE DEVELOPERS HERE AT OUR MEETUP HAVE HAD BIG PROBLEMS SETTING UP SITES ON GODADDY AND MIGRATING SITES FROM GODADDY. I CURRENTLY HAVE DOMAINS REGISTERED WITH GODADDY BUT DON’T HAVE ANY HOSTED SITES THERE. I USE SITEGROUND AND BLUEHOST CURRENTLY.

BackUp Buddy (commercial WordPress plugin from iThemes) in the next version will offer scheduled backups to AmazonS3 and DropBox, along with other locations

Now hearing from Chris Jean
- Why is WordPress great? It’s so easy to use for so many people with different levels of technical expertise
- BuddyPress is a plugin that lets your WordPress site become a social network

Chris works a lot now with the Builder theme (a commercial theme available from iThemes)
- used to use Flexx theme a lot a few years ago
- Builder is a long-term project of Chris’
- designed to let people use a huge number of different layouts, using a single theme
- my goal is making things easier for the “normal/regular” user (people who are not pHp developers
(Chris demoed how to make quick modifications with Builder)
- there are 20+ child themes (skins) available for Builder

I AM SO GLAD TO GET BACK TO THIS OKC WORDPRESS USER’S GROUP! I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO ATTEND SINCE LAST SUMMER BECAUSE I WAS TEACHING IN DENTON LAST FALL!

Tip from Tim Priebe: Use Artisteer software ($100) to build WordPress themes from scratch (Mac version is still in beta)

Matt Danner shared several great tips after the meeting with me relating to iPhoneography:
- Camera Plus is a great iPhone photo app (free)
- Chase Jarvis is an amazing photographer known (among other things) for his iPhoneography (blog, twitter, youtube, vimeo)
- Best Camera is Chase’ iPhone photography app ($3)

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, wordpress, okc, okcwp

OKC #wordpress Users Group Meetup Notes: Jan 2011 #okcwp originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 31, 2011.

photo credit: Mexicanwave

Are there any other “top ten” ideas or recommendations you’d add to these suggestions for writing better blog posts?

10 Ways to Write Better Blog Posts originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 18, 2011.

As a large and influential educational organization, ISTE (The International Society for Technology in Education) has had my attention for many months as they continue to utilize a variety of social media platforms to not only “share their message” but also encourage feedback and discussion about a variety of issues of interest to educators worldwide. Two years ago, I signed a contract to blog for ISTE in the initial six months of their “ISTE Connects” blog. In the past few months, I’ve had a series of conversations with representatives of “The Master Teacher” about how social media can be effectively leveraged by educational organizations and businesses to better communicate with constituents, customers, and others using tools like blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter. (Full Disclosure: I’m currently negotiating a contract to consult with Master Teacher and assist them with their social media strategy.)

At some point in the past two years, iStrategyLabs (the company which contracted with ISTE to create the original ISTEconnects.org blog, and subcontracted with me to blog for a six month stint) transitioned management and control of the blog over to ISTE staff. Although I was no longer directly involved with iStrategyLabs or ISTE at that point, I observed this “handoff” of control and have watched with interest as ISTE has used their blog (and Twitter account, @isteconnects) in a variety of ways. Here are some sample posts from the past few months from ISTE, along with a little information about each poster.

Posts by Katie Stansberry (blog / social media manager for ISTE)
- “WAITING FOR SUPERMAN” AN EMOTIONAL CALL FOR AMERICAN EDUCATION REFORM
- “MY TODDLER USES AN IPHONE: ENCOURAGING EXPLORATION IN THE VERY YOUNG”

Post by Hillary Goldman (ISTE Director of Government Affairs)
- “VOICES CARRY: E-RATE RULING HAS PROS AND CONS”

Post by Christopher Johnson (feature article in ISTE’s Learning and Leading Magazine, republished online)
- “Design New Spaces for Learning”

Post by Nancy Barlow (guest blogger, regular blog is http://theteachergeek.com)
- FROM THE 48TH FLOOR TO THE CLASSROOM DOOR: WHY I CHOOSE A SECOND CAREER AS A TEACHER

Post about Don Knezek (ISTE CEO) and his presentation schedule at the end of 2010. Includes slideshare of Don’s Global Education Conference preso (www.slideshare.net/isteconnects)
- “ISTE CEO DON KNEZEK, GLOBAL LEADERSHIP FOR DIGITAL AGE LEARNING”

Official ISTE post about 2011 conference
- “HOUSING FOR ISTE 2011 GOING FAST”

Post by Leslie Conery (Deputy CEO and ISTE Conference Chair)
- “SOUTH AFRICA VISIT SHOWS POWER OF EDUCATION TO CHANGE LIVES”

As you can see from the examples above, ISTE mixes regular content from their blog / social media manager (Katie Stansberry) with posts from a variety of ISTE employees as well as guest bloggers. The use of guest bloggers to provide new content and attract eyeballs is something many more organizations are doing and trying to do today. TechLearning.com is one organization which has solicited and published guest blog posts for years. EduTopia is another organization which effectively shares regular guest blog posts. Among educational organizations, I think EduTopia has one of the best websites for guest bloggers. I really like the way they call ALL their bloggers “contributors,” and show everyone’s personal icon in the blog sidebar.

My main complaint about the EduTopia blog is their use of a truncated RSS feed. As you can see in the following screenshot from my Google Reader, this means people CANNOT read the actual blog post being shared without visiting the source website. TechDirt’s post last year, “Truncated RSS Is A Bad Business Decision” as well as Ed Kohler’s 2007 post, “Truncated RSS Feeds Kill Conversations and Long Term Traffic” summarize many of my own views on this topic well.

The educational organizations doing the best job of leveraging social media to communicate with constituents and “attract eyeballs” today are finding ways to include varied, diverse voices in their blog, Facebook and Twitter posts. Rather than simply be a venue for direct organizational marketing, however, these social media “shares” provide opportunities to highlight emerging trends, focus on timely news articles, as well as related hyperlinks. Posters can (and often do) amplify organizational initiatives, programs and services, but those “plugs” are shared most effectively in the context of another topic. ISTE wants everyone to attend and register for the 2011 conference in Philadelphia, but the official post from October about the conference focuses on housing arrangements. If an organizational blog looks, reads, and sounds too much like an infomercial, it may turn off prospective readers / viewers. The tone of an effective organizational blog should not be “salesy.” Ideally, I think the tone should be conversational and informational, as well as occasionally persuasive. In many cases, it can be important for readers to know WHO is doing the blogging, the tweeting, or the Facebook sharing. That’s not always the case, but in general transparency is expected and desirable with social media. It’s clear who’s tweeting @isteconnects (see the profile image) but not with @edutopia. Both approaches seem to be working, but perhaps not as equally well.

The degree of cross-promotion an organization gives to it social media “connection channels” is directly tied to the “followership” and reach of those platforms. In this case, EduTopia is an exemplar while ISTE (currently) is not.

In the past few weeks, ISTE has made a major shift in its social media engagement strategy by choosing to ditch / eliminate its two year old WordPress site (previously on isteconnects.org) and instead import / integrate all old posts into its primary website content management system. One of the major disadvantages of this move is that past posts on the site are no longer indexed by Google, and the new site (IMHO, of course) is far less functional and user friendly than the older WordPress version was.

Organizations of all sizes can have interesting political dynamics, and I am not privy to the decisions which went into this move by ISTE to ditch WordPress. I do know that as a blogger and contributor to the past ISTEconnects.org blog, it was upsetting to see past content move out from its former WordPress home into a CMS which appears less functional and user friendly. At least past posts have been moved, rather than deleted. That’s a good thing. Seeing past posts stripped of Google indexed hyperlinks feels disconcerting, however. It’s like someone peeled away and discarded part of my digital footprint. That’s the prerogative of the organization, of course, but actions like this may have unintended consequences. (It could make it harder to recruit new guest bloggers in the future.)

Social media is an exciting field fraught with opportunities as well as pitfalls. One of the remarkable things about it is that “the textbook hasn’t been written,” so to speak, about best practices with social media. It’s valuable to study different organizations like ISTE, EduTopia, TechLearning, and others to analyze what they are doing with social media and what seems to be working well. Perhaps by studying their examples, we can apply some of their “lessons learned” to our own organizations and classrooms.

In every case, the importance of comment moderation cannot be understated. If you’re “turning on” an organizational or classroom blog, make sure you turn on comment moderation! The last thing most school administrators want is divisive controversy over a new interactive site representing their organization to the wider world. That’s not to say blogs should simply be “echo-chambers” filled with the voices of fanboys and fangirls. Debate and disagreement should be welcome and included. The voices of Internet trolls, however, should be excluded, and comment moderation can enable site administrators to do this effectively.

Technorati Tags:
google, social, media, blog, blogging, team, guest, facebook, edutopia, iste, techlearning

Observations about Organizational Blogging and Social Media Use originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 11, 2011.

Our theme for tomorrow’s webcast is Photo 365 projects, which Sarah and I have started for 2011. We are both using Tumblr blogs to share our photos, and iPhones (1st gen and an iPhone4) to take our daily pics. Sarah’s 365 blog is on 365.thezebraprint.com and mine is 365.wesfryer.com. Charles’ 365 blog is www.charlesfarrellart.com/365/. I’m excited to learn more about what Charles as well as Dean are doing with their photography. Dean has a Flickr photo feed Twitter account as @dshareski, and has a photo Twitter list on shareski/photos. His 365 photos are on Flickr. Bob has links to three different photography blogs from art.bobsprankle.com: His 365 blog, an iPhoneography blog, and a PhotoShop blog. Cheryl’s well into year 2 of her 365 photo project, and posts daily to a Flickr set. I don’t think Alice is doing a 365 photo project.

Since I’m now following 365 photo projects on multiple platforms (not just Tumblr) I’ve subscribed to these sites within a single Google Reader category. I made that into a Google Reader Bundle (including 16 different feeds at present) and you can subscribe to it if desired.

The conversations begin tomorrow evening (North American time) at 7:30 pm EST / 6:30 pm CST / 5:30 pm MST / 4:30 pm PDT. Visit edtechtalk.com/live to join, listening to the live audio stream and joining in the backchannel text chat.

Archived Seedlings webcasts are available on Bob Sprankle’s Bit by Bit blog. Follow @SeedlingsPLN on Twitter, and also “Like” the Seedlings Facebook page to stay up to date on upcoming shows.

Also don’t miss the Seedlings’ “Geek of the Week” links shared on Delicious.com as seedlingsgeekoftheweek.

Technorati Tags:
webcast, seedlings, photo, 365, photography, digital, storytelling, digitalstorytelling

Photo 365 Projects on Seedlings: Thurs Jan 6th originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on January 5, 2011.

There are several reasons I chose Tumblr for my 365 blog. Ryan Collins‘ comment on my post earlier this week, “365 Photo Blog: Posterous, WordPress or just Flickr?” was one reason. Since writing the post, “Quickblogging Options: Comparing tumblr and posterous” in May 2010, I’ve become an avid Posterous user. This has become increasingly the case as I’ve used my iPad more for media consumption as well as sharing. Although I enjoy using both the WordPress iOS app (free) and Blogpress ($3) to post to my blogs from my iPhone, the Notes application combined with email and a Posterous site remains a VERY easy way to mobile blog as well – and generally my preferred method these days. I explained this process in my November 30th post, “iPad Blogging with Posterous.” I haven’t become familiar with Tumblr in the past six months, however, and as Ryan suggested it’s a great option for a 365 project.

I’m a vocal advocate for “digital sandboxes,” and this means having online spaces to create and share where the stakes are low and the peer support factor is high.

I want to become more familiar with the capabilities as well as limitations of Tumblr, especially as it compares to Posterous and WordPress, so I figured the best way is to start using it regularly. A 365 photo project seems like a great way to operationalize this wish into a practical goal. The great looking, free Tumblr app for iOS (which I’ve used the past two days to post my initial photos) also looks like a great reason to use Tumblr.

With choices like video and audio, in addition to photos, I may include some varied multimedia in my daily posts to 365.wesfryer.com!

The main disadvantage I see to Tumblr so far, compared to Posterous, is that it does not appear to support cross-posting to sites other than Twitter. With a Posterous blog I can have content cross-post to both Flickr and another blog, if desired. If Tumblr supports this functionality, I haven’t been able to find it yet. (Please let me know if it does!) It would be nice if Tumblr could auto-post to a website like 365project.org too, but I don’t think it can do that either. I’m planning to save the photos I use for my 365 project to my local hard drive as well as my Flickr account, although I’m not sure I’ll be creating a special “365 photo set” on Flickr since I don’t think Tumblr can help me do that automatically. The worst-case scenario for my project is that Tumblr will go the way of Drop.io and discontinue service, or other web 2.0 companies and go completely offline. That may happen, but it’s worth hedging my bets to learn more about Tumblr and its capabilities. I’m increasingly convinced a key litmus test for digital usability is the NUMBER OF STEPS it takes to do something. Sites like Posterous and Tumblr make sharing easier than ever, and for these reasons I think we need to consider recommending these sites to others who may be just getting started with social media and idea sharing. If you think Blogging with Blogger.com is “easy” and simple, try Posterous or Tumblr. These sites define “quick blogging” today, IMHO.

Alan Levine follows @dailyshoot on Twitter to get 365 photo inspiration. Do you have other sources of inspiration you’d recommend for 365 photographers embarking on this journey?

Several of Bob Sprankle’s amazing collection of iPhone photography apps have made it onto my wish list for Santa this year!

My artistic photography skills may never match those of Marco Torres, but I know I’ll become a better photographer if I deliberately engage in photography daily and regularly share my creations with others! If you’re not already engaged in a 365 photos project, consider starting one in 2011! It’s a New Year’s Resolution that’s bound to bear some creative fruit!

Technorati Tags:
blog, iphone, photography, posterous, share, wordpress, photo365, 365photo, tumblr, iphone4

Tumblr for my 365 Photo Project in 2011 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 15, 2010.

For those readers who have (and/or currently) participate in the 365 photo blogging project, what is your opinion about this question? Are their advantages or benefits of Posterous or a self-hosted WordPress blog which make it an obvious choice for a 365 photos blog? Is Flickr all I should use for the project, or is cross-posting to a blog worthwhile from a networking / learning standpoint or for other reasons?

Technorati Tags:
blog, flickr, photo, photos, posterous, 365, 365photos

365 Photo Blog: Posterous, WordPress or just Flickr? originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 12, 2010.

1. Best Individual Edublog
2. Best Resource Sharing Blog
3. Lifetime Achievement

Please take some time and cast your votes in these and other categories. One vote per IP per category is allowed. I think winners will be announced by the end of the year, but I’m not sure the exact date.

I know there are mixed feelings about the EduBlog Awards. Last year Miguel Guhlin declined his nomination. Tim Holt has posted contrarian ideas in the past about it. I didn’t actively solicit votes with a post last year, as I am this year, and I certainly acknowledge like any contest involving popular voting there is going to be some controversy as well as dissension. The point of blogging is not to earn an award, but there are definitely constructive benefits to a contest like this which go beyond “the good feeling” winners have each year and the prizes awarded by EduBlogs. An example is seeing links for the 34 nominees in the “Best New Blog” category. I’ve subscribed to all of these (to which I was not already subscribed) in Google Reader, and I might not have encountered many of these without the contest.

Is everyone “a winner” for sharing their ideas with the wide world on their blog? Yes, absolutely. Does everyone deserve recognition for their blogging efforts? Yes, absolutely. Are contests like the EduBlog awards inherently biased, unfair, and therefore not worthwhile? No — There are many benefits to the contest, and the opportunity to amplify educator voices and ideas for a wider audience is one of the most important.

I encourage you to take some time to vote for many outstanding nominees this year, and consider subscribing to many of the nominees in your own news reader / RSS aggregator. Google Reader is my favorite, and all my education-related feeds are available if you want to check those out as well.

Technorati Tags:
award, awards, blog, blogging, edublog, vote, voting

2010 EduBlog Award Nominations: Please Vote! originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on December 4, 2010.

That’s it! It is possible to configure your Posterous website to cross-post to other websites and locations, but that is not required. I used this method to blog our last session here in Manchester, NH on a “This I Believe” style project for communities. When you want to share links, simply paste the full URL and Posterous will make them hyperlinked in your post.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad Blogging with Posterous #cmtc10 #edapp originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 30, 2010.

Resources available for this session include:

1. Referenced links and resources
2. Slides shared on SlideShare.net

Technorati Tags:
blog, blogging, education, globaled10, share, sharing, web2, wiki

Archive of today/tonight’s #globaled10 Elluminate session: Share Your Ideas originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 18, 2010.

This is the first presentation I’ve created which entirely uses screenshots taken on my iPad, and then imported into Keynote. (There’s a fast way to do this!) I did use Cloud Browse (now 99¢) to capture a few of the screenshots which included Flash-based content. Referenced resources for this presentation are available on my wiki. My keynote is sponsored by Educational Collaborators.

Technorati Tags:
education, ideas, presentation, share, globaled, globaled10

Share Your Ideas: Platforms for Publishing #globaled10 originally appeared on Moving at the Speed of Creativity on November 17, 2010.