Getting to grips with blogger

A little visual aid for getting your Blogger blog started.

Social Networking & Learning

After a busy with my fabulous new group of PCET students I began to reflect on the day’s activities. The course I am teaching is a 7 day intensive ICT module for teaching and learning. The students are very eager, interesting and interested and so a pleasure to engage with. Their ICT skills range as you would expect from any new group of people, but what they do share is their understanding that ICT is a valuable teaching and learning tool. We learned such a lot together yesterday.

The main aspect of the day was to discuss the place of social networking in education, in particular to aid reflective practice. My challenge, however, is to teach the students about applications that they can use in their teaching and learning, without keeping them too long on the computers, as the course is all day! Ideally the discussions would have taken place on the forum setup on Moodle our university VLE. So, to avoid over use of the technology, they used felt pens and sheets of A3, with pleasure I might add. The downfall was that there was no record after they fed back their group responses as there would have been on the forum. The forum would also have allowed for follow-up contributions and reflections, but it was a necessary sacrifice for my group’s well-being.

We had lots of issues setting up blogs using Blogger. The main issue, which I suppose is really intended to be an asset, was that fact Blogger constantly encourages sharing with Google+. I wanted to keep things simple and separate but these days it is getting harder to do. The bonus with all the instant linking is that you are sharing your information with your ‘circles’ as they are called in Google+ and they can easily be linked to your Facebook and Twitter friends and followers. You just need to be aware of this and to be sure that it is what you really want. My advice is that you don’t rush setting up these new accounts and that you read all the pop-ups so that you don’t accidentally share!

How To Embed A Podcast Into A Blogger from Paty.Savage

New to blogging?

If you are new to blogging the best thing that you can do is follow someone's blog that you find interesting. It could even be mine! Play with the layout and the design of your blog, get familiar with the tools and formats.

Posting from my iPad app

I thought that I would try the Blogger iPad app out to post on my blog. Unfortunately there are quite a few posts that don't show on the blog when you view it on the iPad. But the app is quite nice. It is very easy to use to make simple posts, quite straightforward but with far less of the frills than the full application on google offers. Only to be expected really. One nice feature though is the fact that you can create a video stream and post it straight to your blog. If I had anything worth filming I would test it now and post, but alas I sit in front of the TV relaxing on a Friday evening. It also allows you to add images from your camera roll, but I can't seem to upload a video I have already created? I will keep trying and hopefully I'll discover some useful little tricks.

The first round

Well that was the first round over. I took advice from Will Richardson in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. He suggested that I gave my students a topic to research first, which I decided would be something fun, so I gave the girls makeup and the boys cars. Quite sexist I know, but I thought it would be a good focus and would cause some discussion. Lots of the students stayed safe and looked at how the topic affected them, whether it was the fact that they didn’t use the product or whether they couldn’t live without it. Some students took a different approach as they researched their topic, they were guided by what they were reading, which was the whole point and showed that they were actually reading! We all created new blog sites successfully and with a variety of creativity, I am please to say. There are some little quirks with Blogger that I didn’t understand, such as when you choose a template, it does not always use a suitable font colour for the page background. For example, if you have a black background, a white font would be most suitable, you have to change the font colour yourself, which means that you can’t actually see the text on the editor page! (Obviously we just changed the font colour at the last minute.) The students seemed to enjoy the session, each was asked to comment on someone else’s blog, some comments were more appropriate than others, but this was just a test run. I hope to get the journal blogs going very soon though...I’ll keep you posted.