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Post It & Forget About It
Archive for November, 2009
Why Students Should Blog
Nov 9th
Educational Blogging
Table of Contents
What Is a Blog?
Wikipedia defines a blog as, “A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log or weblog) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order.” Blogging is the posting of journal-like pages to a website. While these pages can contain photos or media, they are primarily focused on the easy ability to post written thoughts to a website. The postings are organized chronologically. Typically, a blog “post” can be “commented” on by others, allowing for a dialogue on a the topic of the post. Teachers and educators have used blogs to allow for what is commonly called “peer review,” meaning that students can post writings or assignments to the web, and other students can respond or encourage through the comment feature. In a broader and more educational system, blogs are about communicating. You observe your experience, reflect on it, and then write about it. Other people read your reflections, respond from their perspectives by commenting or writing their own blog article. You read their perspectives, often learn something through their eyes, and write some more.
- Blogging is about reading and writing.
- Literacy is about reading and writing.
- Blogging is about literacy. (dfw)
Educational Blogging
Educational Blogging is blogging by students, teachers, administrators, industry experts, and other involved entities that focus primarily on the educational process and educational interests.
This Website
In the context of this website, we will focus primarily on the use of blogging as an educational tool that teachers introduce to their students, then use as a means of promoting learning. One of the great educational benefits of the read/write web, and blogging particularly, is the opportunity for the student to become a “teacher” by presenting material to an audience. When we teach, we learn.
Uses for Blogging in Education
Teacher Communication
Teachers will often start a blog for providing communication to students, parents, or other teachers. Sometimes this is just the posting of homework or other assignments in one easy-to-find location. Other times this can be a richer description of the things taking place in the classroom, specifically drawing the parents into what their children are working on, or for students who have been absent. This type of blog can also take advantage of the comment feature for students and parents to ask questions or for clarification, where the answer would be of interest to all the readers.
Dialogue Generation
A teacher blog that posts questions about current subject matter can be a great way to introduce students to responding in writing and contributing collaboratively. For instance, a teacher might ask specific thought-provoking questions about a book the class is reading, and ask for students to respond through the comments feature with their ideas. This is often done as a voluntary exercise to help demonstrate the uses of blogs in easy steps.
Student Blogs
The providing of each student with an individual blog seems to generate the most significant enthusiasm for blogging among students. Whether done through special programs that allow strict teacher control and filtering on the blog posts and comments, or through public services with parent and teacher oversight, students with individual blogs have an opportunity to discover the work and joy of communicating their ideas in written form, and then getting feedback from others. Sometimes the blogs are not made public, and the feedback is just from classmates or specifically-allowed individuals; other times, and more often with older students, the feedback can come from the wider audience of the World Wide Web. Most often public student blogs are done under a nickname and without any personal details, so that the incredible excitement that can come from communicating with a global audience does not place the student in harm’s way. Student blogging has to be overseen with coaching and training to make sure that both that personal data is not communicated and that blog posts are appropriate.
Teacher Blogs
Teachers can blog for each other about their experiences teaching, their philosophies, and their methodologies.
What blogging does for students
Helps them find a voice
Another benefit to educational blogging (and wiki-writing) is the opportunity for the student to find a personal “voice” and to develop individual interests. Much like journal-writing, blogging gives wings to ideas that otherwise may can stay trapped in the mind. Many individuals find that blog-writing changes their lives in a significant way by allowing them to express their ideas in a medium that appears to have life and longevity–and that might find a kindred audience.
Creates enthusiasm for writing and communications
It is not expected that all students will take to blogging (just as not all students enjoy writing), but it is believed that blogging has a unique ability to create enthusiasm for writing and the communication of ideas.
Engages students in conversation and learning
Educational Blogging is more than just being about writing, just like writing is more than just writing business correspondence or a lab report for Chemistry class.Unlike traditional forms of publication that are one-way, when the work is done at the end of the publication process, students can be engaged in ongoing conversations about their ideas and thoughts. This can be threatening for some administrators afraid of endangering children, yet, it brings a reality to the classroom that was not previously possible.
Provides an opportunity to teach about responsible journalism
Because students who are posting blogs reach an audience with their posts, whereas a personal diary can be kept private, students have the opportunity in blogging to learn about the power of the published word. Whereas they might be tempted to criticise or make fun of someone in private conversation or in a diary, they can be taught about responsible journalism, and that the consequences of these kinds of remarks in the new world of the read/write web can be serious and long-lasting.
Empowers students
Student blogging is incredibly empowering in the following ways: 1) Instead of writing as a mechanized approach to empowerment where we learn to write well enough for school and work, we learn to write for life-long learning purposes. 2) Writing and blogging and life are intertwined as difficult issues are exposed and dealt with in a transparent community of voices. Although this type of writing entails risk and trust, growth and teamwork naturally result. 3) Writing and blogging encourage students’ initiative to write, to be engaged at more than just the head level. It involves writing from head and heart. Children often have not learned to do more than live from the heart, while adults have concentrated their efforts on more cerebral approaches. This means adults and children can bridge the gap that exists by writing together, creating a community of writers in their classrooms where there is no pseudo-community, only community where humans write.
http://supportblogging.com/Educational+Blogging
20 reasons why students should blog
Blogging is such powerful learning material and students should blog.
Why?………………………Here are just 20 reasons
This post has been written as a draft for a few days, but I wish to publish it now, in support of @alupton and his wonderful minilegends. (They have been asked to remove their blog by their education department)
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It is FUN! Fun!….. I hear your sceptical exclamation!! However, it is wonderful when students think they are having so much fun, they forget that they are actually learning. A favourite comment on one of my blog posts is: It’s great when kids get so caught up in things they forget they’re even learning…
by jodhiay -
authentic audience – no longer working for a teacher who checks and evalutes work but a potential global audience.
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Suits all learning styles – special ed (this student attends special school 3days per weeek, our school 2 days per week, gifted ed, visual students, multi-literacies plus ‘normal‘ students.
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Increased motivation for writing – all students are happy to write and complete aspects of the post topic. Many will add to it in their own time.
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Increased motivation for reading – my students will happily spend a lot of time browsing through fellow student posts and their global counterparts. Many have linked their friends onto their blogroll for quick access. Many make comments, albeit often in their own sms language.
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Improved confidence levels – a lot of this comes through comments and global dots on their cluster maps. Students can share their strengths and upload areas of interest or units of work eg personal digital photography, their pets, hobbies etc Staff are given an often rare insight into what some students are good at. We find talents that were otherwise unknown and it allows us to work on those strengths. It allows staff to often gain insight to how students are feeling and thinking.
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Pride in their work – My experience is that students want their blogs to look good in both terms of presentation and content. (Sample of a year 10 boy’s work)
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Blogs allow text, multimedia, widgets, audio and images – all items that digital natives want to use
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Increased proofreading and validation skills
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Improved awareness of possible dangers that may confront them in the real world, whilst in a sheltered classroom environment
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Ability to share – part of the conceptual revolution that we are entering. They can share with each other, staff, their parents, the community, and the globe.
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Mutual learning between students and staff and students.
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Parents with internet access can view their child’s work and writings – an important element in the parent partnership with the classroom. Grandparents from England have made comments on student posts. Parents have ‘adopted’ students who do not have internet access and ensured they have comments.
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Blogs may be used for digital portfolios and all the benefits this entails
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Work is permanently stored, easily accessed and valuable comparisons can be made over time for assessment and evaluation purposes
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Students are digital natives - blogging is a natural element of this.
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Gives students a chance to show responsibility and trustworthiness and engenders independence.
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Prepares students for digital citizenship as they learn cybersafety and netiquette
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Fosters peer to peer mentoring. Students are happy to share, learn from and teach their peers (and this, often not their usual social groups)
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Allows student led professional development and one more……
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Students set the topics for posts – leads to deeper thinking activities
This is surely powerful learning!!
Since this post was written, students have been asked to give their reasons why they should blog and here is a year 9 girl’s answer.
Some further posts that might be of interest
- What I need to teach students in order to blog!
- Keeping Students Cybersafe - the first and most important lesson
http://murcha.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/20-reasons-why-students-should-blog/
Wordpress Pages
Nov 9th
In WordPress, you can write either posts or pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts automatically appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages, on the other hand, are for content such as “About Me,” “Contact Me,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present information about yourself or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content.
Other examples of common pages include Copyright, Legal Information, Reprint Permissions, Company Information, and Accessibility Statement. (By the way, it’s a good idea to always have an about page and a contact page — see this advice from Lorelle.)
In general, Pages are very similar to Posts in that they both have Titles and Content and can use your site’s Presentation Templates to maintain a consistent look throughout your site. Pages, though, have several key distinctions that make them quite different from Posts.
Pages in a Nutshell
What Pages Are:
- Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts.
- Pages can be organized into pages and SubPages.
- Pages can use different Page Templates which can include Template Files, Template Tags and other PHP code.
What Pages are Not:
- Pages are not Posts, nor are they excerpted from larger works of fiction. They do not cycle through your blog’s main page. (Note: You can include Posts in Pages by using the Inline Posts Plugin.)
- Pages cannot be associated with Categories and cannot be assigned Tags. The organizational structure for Pages comes only from their hierarchical interrelationships, and not from Tags or Categories.
- Pages are not files. They are stored in your database just like Posts are.
- Although you can put Template Tags and PHP code into a Page Template, you cannot put these into the content of a Page and expect them to run. (Note: You can achieve this by using a PHP evaluating Plugin such as Exec-PHP or RunPHP.)
Creating Pages
To create a new Page, log in to your WordPress installation with sufficient admin privileges to create new articles. Select the Administration > Pages > Add New option to begin writing a new Page.
Changing the URL (or “Slug”) of Your Pages
With 2.5, changing the page URL became less intuitive. If you have Permalinks enabled, and you have selected the Day and Name option (Click the Settings tab, and then click the Permalinks subtab), then the permalink automatically shows up below your post title when you start typing in the body of your post (not just the title).
However, if you have a different permalink option selected, or if you don’t have permalinks enabled at all, you must do the following to edit your page URL:
- Write a page by going to Write > Page.
- Click the Publish button to publish your page.
- Go to Manage > Pages.
- Click Edit next to your page.
- See the permalink under the title, and click the Edit link to change it.
Thus, if you don’t have the right permalink option enabled, you have to publish your pages before you can set the URLs.
Listing Your Pages on Your Site
WordPress is able to automatically generate a list of Pages on your site, for example within the sidebar, using a Template Tag called wp_list_pages(). See the wp_list_pages page for information on how to do the following:
- Sort the list of Pages (to fully customize the order in which the Pages are listed, you might find the “Page Order” section on the Write > Page administration panel useful),
- exclude (or ‘hide’) a Page from the list,
- Control which Pages are displayed (i.e., all Pages or just certain SubPages), and
- Control how deep into your Page hierarchy the list goes.
Naturally, you can also link to Pages manually with an HTML link. For example, if you want your Copyright Page listed in your footer, that link might read as below:
If you do not have Permalinks set up
<a title="Copyright information" href="wordpress/?page_id=14">Copyright 1996-2006</a>
If you do have Permalinks set up
<a title="Copyright information" href="wordpress/copyright/">Copyright 1996-2006</a>
Note: Your .htaccess file must be writeable for Page Permalinks to work, otherwise you must update your .htaccess file every time you create a Page.
Organizing Your Pages
Just as you can have Subcategories within your Categories, you can also have SubPages within your Pages, creating a hierarchy of pages.
For example, suppose you are creating a WordPress site for a travel agent and would like to create an individual Page for each continent and country to which the agency can make travel arrangements. You would begin by creating a Page called “Africa” on which you could describe general information about travel to Africa. Then you would create a series of Pages which would be SubPages to “Africa” and might include “Lesotho”, “Cameroon”, “Togo”, and “Swaziland”. Another individual Page is made for “South America” and would feature SubPages of “Brazil”, “Argentina”, and “Chile”. Your site would then list:
- Africa
- Cameroon
- Lesotho
- Swaziland
- Togo
- South America
- Argentina
- Brazil
- Chile
To begin the process, go to Administration > Write > Write Page panel, in the upper right corner of the panel and click the “Page Parent” drop-down menu. The drop-down menu contains a list of all the Pages already created for your site. To turn your current Page into a SubPage, or “Child” of the “Parent” Page, select the appropriate Page from the drop-down menu. If you specify a Parent other than “Main Page (no parent)” from the list, the Page you are now editing will be made a Child of that selected Page. When your Pages are listed, the Child Page will be nested under the Parent Page. The Permalinks of your Pages will also reflect this Page hierarchy.
In the above example, the Permalink for the Cameroon Page would be:
http://example.com/africa/cameroon/
WordPress Features
Nov 9th
WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. We are proud to offer you a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform, with sensible default settings and features, and an extremely customizable core.
Managing and Administering the Weblog
- Locally Installed
- WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control over the weblog. Unlike third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your weblog, in case you need to. This also means that you can install WordPress on your desktop or home computer, or even on an Intranet.
- Portable Core
- You can choose to have the tree of wordpress related files, which form the back-end of your publicly displayed weblog, be in the same directory as the weblog or in a different directory. For example, if you want your weblog at http://example.com (public_html – the public “root” of your webserver or hosting account) and you want to store the wordpress related files and directory tree in http://example.com/wordpress (public_html/wordpress), you can!
- UTC friendly
- WordPress allows you to define your time as an offset from Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), so that all the time-related elements stored in the database are stored as GMT values, which is a universal standard. Among other things, this helps you display the correct time on your weblog, even if your host server is located in a different time zone.
- User management
- WordPress uses user-levels to control user-access to different features, so you can restrict the ability of individual users to create or modify content in your weblog, by changing their user-level.
- User profiles
- Each user on your weblog can define a profile, with details such as their email address, instant messaging aliases etc, if they want to. Users can also control the way in which their details are displayed on the weblog.
- Easy installation and upgrade
- WordPress’ famous 5 minute install can’t be beaten for simplicity and ease of use. Upgrading your weblog to the latest version of WordPress is easy, too, and it should take less time than the installation!
- Dynamic page generation
- No rebuilding of all your pages each time you update your weblog, or any aspect of it. All pages are generated using the database and the templates each time a page from your weblog is requested by a viewer. This means that updating your weblog, or its design is as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.
- Internationalization and Localization
- You can now create a weblog that is localized to your choice, and delivered in a language of your choice. The gettext method is used to translate and localize WordPress to the fullest extent.
Publicizing Your Work
- Feeds
- The RSS 1.0 (aka RDF), RSS 2.0 and ATOM specifications are fully supported by WordPress, and what’s more, just about any page on your weblog has an associated feed that your readers can subscribe to – there’s a feed for the latest posts, for categories, comments, well, like we said earlier, for anything you want. The more options your readers have to keep track of different sections of your weblog, the easier it is for you to spread the word around the world. WordPress also fully supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures, so adding mp3 files (such as podcasts) to your RSS feeds is a snap.
- Cruft-free Permalinks
- The URLs for all the pages in your weblog can be made to conform to a standard, cruft-free system, and all the links are structured, sensible, and understandable to human and machines, and that includes search engines. Clean URLs are essential for search engine optimization and an improved user experience.
- Inter-blog Communication
- In an increasingly connected world, WordPress comes ready for PingBack and TrackBack, two very useful ways of connecting to other weblogs, and to enable them to do the same.
Customizing the Design
- Template Driven Design
- WordPress uses templates to generate the pages dynamically. You can control the presentation of content by editing the templates using the Template Editor tool and the Template Tags
- Template and File Editor
- Every installation of WordPress comes with a file editor you can use to edit your templates and other WordPress related files, right in your browser without having to worry about downloading and uploading the files in order to edit them.
- Template Tags
- Template tags make it easier to design the content and information displayed on your weblog. You don’t need to be a PHP whiz to design your weblog.
- Themes
- You can skin your weblog using readily available themes, or styles. You can also create and share your own themes.
- Plugins
- Plugins extend the core functionality of your weblog. A large number of user-developed plugins are already available and can be used to do virtually anything you want to, with your blog.
Creating Content
- Password protection
- So you want to share something with some people, but not everyone? Easy, protect the article in question with a password.
- Post Slug
- If you are using clean PermaLinks on your website, you can define the link to an individual post by using a post-slug.
- Post to the future
- You can write a post today and have it appear on the weblog at a future date, automatically.
- Multi paged posts
- If your post is too long, cut it up into pages, so your readers don’t have to scroll to the end of the world.
- File/picture uploading
- You can upload pictures or files, and link to them or display them in your articles. You have the option of creating thumbnails of pictures when you upload them.
- Categories
- Organize your posts into categories, and sub-categories, and sub-sub categories…
- Emoticons
- WordPress is smart enough to convert character smileys, like “:)” into the graphical image counterparts.
- Save Drafts
- Save your unfinished articles, improve them later, publish when you’re done.
- Previewing Posts
- Before you press the “Publish” button, you can look at the preview for the article you just wrote to check if everything is the way you want it. In fact, you can do that at any time, since the preview is “live”.
- Desktop Tools
- You don’t have to use a browser to update your weblog, you can use any desktop blogging tool that supports the MetaWeblog or Blogger API.
- Blog by email
- You can send your posts as an email and have them appear on the weblog.
- Bookmarklets
- Add the “Press It!” bookmarklet provided by WordPress to your browser and you have a shortcut to create an article with a link to the page currently displayed on your browser!
- Sidebar
- If you don’t like a bookmarklet, use our friendly browser sidebar, which can be used in a similar fashion.
- Formatting
- Think of WordPress as something that makes your words smoother, and your pages more appealing. WordPress ships with text-formatting plugins that clean up your content and add typographic goodness to your articles.
Archives and Search
- Archiving
- After you’ve been blogging for an extended period of time, what matters is how well your posts are organized, and for that, WordPress provides you with several ready made options to display the archives of your blog, containing all the old posts. You can choose from yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, category-wise or author-wise archives, and easily link to the archive pages from the main page (or any other page) of your blog, using a template tag to generate the links to these archive pages. Since WordPress generates pages dynamically, all these archive pages come at no additional space-cost to your server.
- Searching
- WordPress has a functional built-in search tool, which allows visitors to your blog to search for terms they are interested in, and the search-hilite plugin that ships with WordPress can highlight their search terms, so it is even easier for them to find what they were searching for. In addition to this, the plugin also does the same for someone who arrives at your blog by clicking at a search result in a search engine, such as google. All in all, searching is fun, with WordPress.
Discussion and Comments
- Community Building
- WP is not the YMCA, but it does help build communities around weblogs, through the use of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks, helping you keep in touch with the audience and fostering friendship
- Allowed html tags
- Not everyone is evil, but keep those who are in check by limiting which html tags are kosher on your weblog. The default html tags allowed by WordPress are a sane choice to let people use html in their comments, without compromising the safety of your data or server.
- Moderation
- For the control freak in all of us, WordPress provides an array of moderation options. You can moderate
- all comments before they appear on the blog
- comments with specific words in them
- comments posted from specific IP addresses
- comments containing more than some specified number of links.
- All these moderation options keep spammers and vandals in check.
- Notification
- WordPress can keep you in the loop by sending you an email each time there is a new comment or a comment awaiting moderation.
Creating and Managing a Blogroll
- Blogroll
- The blogroll is where you link to the blogs you read frequently – a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there. WordPress’ built-in Links Manager allows you to add and manage links effortlessly
- Bookmarklet
- The effortlessness begins with a neat bookmarklet that you can add to the bookmarks or favourites in your browser. Adding a link to an interesting blog or website is as simple as clicking on the bookmark or favourite when you visit the blog or website the next time!
- Categorizing
- The links in your blogroll can be categorized and neatly organized
- Importing
- If you already have a list o’ links as an OPML file, you can import it to your WordPress blog. For those coming from other blogging tools, this means that you can import your blogroll from Blogrolling.com and never use a third-party service to manage your blogroll, again.
- Exporting
- Did we say you can also export an OPML file with your list o’ links?
- Displaying
- As with everything else, you get some neat template tags that enable you to display your blogroll the way you like – in alphabetical order, ranking order, the order in which they were updated – you get the idea
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Features
Writing Posts
Nov 9th
To write a post:
- Log in to your WordPress Administration Panel (Dashboard).
- Click the Posts tab.
- Click the Add New Sub Tab
- Start filling in the blanks.
- As needed, select a category, add tags, and make other selections from the sections below the post. Each of these sections is explained below.
- When you are ready, click Publish.
- Title
- The title of your post. You can use any words or phrases. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will clean it up for the link to the post, called the post-slug.
- Post Editing Area
- The blank box where you enter your writing, links, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the Visual or the HTML view to compose your posts. For more on the HTML view, see the section below, Visual Versus HTML View.
- Preview button
- Allows you to view the post before officially publishing it.
- Publish box
- Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Published, Pending Review, and Draft. A Published status means the post has been published on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the post has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update post or Publish button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Posts > Edit). To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.
- Publish box
- Visibility – This determines how your post appears to the world. Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site)
- Permalink
- After you save your post, the Permalink below the title shows the potential URL for the post, as long as you have permalinks enabled. (To enable permalinks, go to Settings > Permalinks.) The URL is generated from your title. In previous versions of WordPress, this was referred to as the “page-slug.” The commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters are changed and a dash is put between each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to be “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid” as the title. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.
- Save
- Allows you to save your post as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Posts – Edit in the menu bar, then select your post from the list.
- Publish
- Publishes your post on the site. You can edit the time when the post is published by clicking the Edit link above the Publish button and specifying the time you want the post to be published. By default, at the time the post is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the post within the database.
- Post Tags
- Refers to micro-categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with similar tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags. Tags have to be enabled with the right code in your theme for them to appear in your post. Add new tags to the post by typing the tag into the box and clicking “Add”.
- Categories
- The general topic the post can be classified in. Generally, bloggers have 7-10 categories for their content. Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category. To add a new category, click the +Add New Category link in this section. You can manage your categories by going to Posts > Categories.
- Excerpt
- A summary or brief teaser of your posts featured on the front page of your site as well as on the category, archives, and search non-single post pages. Note that the Excerpt does not usually appear by default. It only appears in your post if you have changed the index.php template file to display the Excerpt instead of the full Content of a post. If so, WordPress will automatically use the first 55 words of your post as the Excerpt or up until the use of the More Quicktag mark. If you use an Explicit Excerpt, this will be used no matter what. For more information, see Excerpt.
- Send Trackbacks
- A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one by a space. See Trackbacks and Pingbacks for more information.
- Custom Fields
- Custom_Fields offer a way to add information to your site. In conjunction with extra code in your template files or plugins, Custom Fields can modify the way a post is displayed. These are primarily used by plugins, but you can manually edit that information in this section.
- Discussion
- Options to enable interactivity and notification of your posts. This section hosts two check boxes: Allow Comments on this post and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this post. If Allowing Comments is unchecked, no one can post comments to this particular post. If Allowing Pings is unchecked, no one can post pingbacks or trackbacks to this particular post.
- Password Protect This Post
- To password protect a post, click Edit next to Visibility in the Publish area to the top right, then click Password Protected, click Ok, and enter a password. Then click OK. Note – Editor and Admin users can see password protected or private posts in the edit view without knowing the password.
- Post Author
- A list of all blog authors you can select from to attribute as the post author. This section only shows if you have multiple users with authoring rights in your blog. To view your list of users, see Users tab on the far right. For more information, see Users and Authors.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts
What is a “blog”?
Nov 9th
“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.
Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, home staging, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all types of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.
Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
- A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
- An archive of older articles.
- A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
- A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll“.
- One or more “feeds” like RSS, Atom or RDF files.
Some blogs may have additional features beyond these. Watch this short video for a simple explanation for what a blog is.
Content Management System
Nov 9th
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
A content management system (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer based. The procedure are designed to:
- Allow for large numbers of people to contribute to and share stored data
- Control access to data based on user roles. User role are used to define each use as to what information they can view or edit
- Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
- Reduce repetitive duplicate input
- Improve the ease of report writing
- Improve communication between users
In a CMS data can be defined as almost anything – documents, movies, pictures, phone number, scientific data, etc. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, revising, and publishing documentation. Content that is controlled is industry-specific. (Entertainment content differs from the design of a fighter jet). There are various terms for systems (related processes) that do this. Examples include: Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Digital Records Management, Electronic Content Management (and others). Synchronization of intermediate steps, and collation into a final product are common goals of each.
Web Content Management System is content management system (CMS) software, implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions.
The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease.
Introduction to Wordpress
Nov 9th
We have everything to do with WordPress (the Greatest CMS platform on the Internet)
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
http://wordpress.org/
Wordpress vs other options
Nov 9th
We had several options to consider when building our class teachers’ website:
- Building a website from scratch using HTML code. Impressive, but only to people who can appreciate the geeky side of life. There are lots of free and easy software solutions out there to make a professional looking website.
- Using a free blogging platform (i.e. Blogger, WordPress.com, Edublogs.org, etc.) These are all great places to start (and we’ve used them all), but we wanted to have the flexibility to customize our class blog without any limitations. (WordPress.com and Edublogs.org offer watered-down versions of WordPress.)
- Using a wiki. Wikispaces.com offers free wikis for educators, but we’ve found the wikispaces software to be a little limiting. (1. We’re not a fan of their internal mail / chat system, 2. it’s hard to really customize the look and feel of the wiki site, and 3. the simultaneous editing of a text by multiple users seemed prone to frustrating errors. Students found Google Docs was better at merging simultaneous edits from different students.)
http://blog.classroomteacher.ca/386/still-using-wordpress-for-our-classroom-website/
More Reasons
- We’re not sure what kind of flexibility we can get with the look-and-feel of a Google Apps powered classroom website. With WordPress, we know there are thousands of themes that we can use and customize. Google sites all seem to look the same. Great for 90% of teachers out there, but we’re looking for more flexibility.
- WordPress is blogging software which means it comes with a RSS feed. (We couldn’t find a RSS feed option in Google Docs.) You can use Feedburner (incidently now owned by Google) to send out email newsletters everytime you post homework on your class website. (In fact, there’s a RSS feed for each category on your website, so if you have several classes sharing the same school website, as long as you categorize your posts, you can have different RSS feeds for each class.)
- WordPress allows you to use widgets in your sidebar. There doesn’t seem to be as much flexibility and freedom inserting 3rd party code into a Google Sites powered classroom website. (They don’t allow javascript for security reasons. PHP is a paid premium feature.) We like using widgets like clustrmaps or feedjit to show our students where their traffic is coming from.
- We can set up our WordPress blog so that it can only be accessed from school computers (by only allowing certain IP addresses to get access to the administration side of the class blog.) In the past, we’ve tried to have students complete all of their writing assignments at school so we can see exactly what they’re capable of. Locking down the back-end of the class website helped. (Students can still visit the class website from home, they just couldn’t log in and edit their work.) This level of control is only possible if you’re hosting your own website.
- You have more control over comments in WordPress. There doesn’t seem to be a good way that visitors can leave comments on a Google Site powered classroom blog. Mind you, Google sites wasn’t designed to be blogs; they have Blogger for that. In WordPress, you can open or close individual pages to comments and you can select who can leave comments: anyone, logged in visitors, etc. Teaches can moderate comments on a school blog powered by WordPress.
- WordPress is infinetly expandable. It’s an open-source project which means there are hundreds of people around the world contributing to it. There are plugins for everything that allow you to add extra functionality to your class website.
http://blog.classroomteacher.ca/386/still-using-wordpress-for-our-classroom-website/
WordPress more than just a blog. As well as being able to post, your users can also create static pages (great for eportfolios!) manage comments in incredible detail, set static front pages, password protect individual posts and create powerful muti-tiered and complex websites… without ever needing to know one iota of html.
All posts are automatically spell-checked, auto-saved (so you never lose that post you’ve been working on for hours) come with a complete feature rich editor (with optional plain text view), allow for simple uploading of images and other files, are podcast ready and have automatic YouTube, Google Video and more video insertion devices… and that’s just a selection. Phew!
Teachers’ Workshop – Introduction to Wordpress
Nov 9th
- Informal Survey
- Introduction to Content Management Software
- Introduction to Wordpress
- Wordpress for Educators
- Creating a Post in Wordpress
- Creating a Page in Wordpress