eLearning journal

Have you been wondering about online surveys, bookmarking, blogging, or podcasting but not really sure where to begin. Here are two websites that provide easy to follow video guides that will be really useful if you are thinking about using more web technologies in your teaching.

Web2practice from JISC Netskills:
So far they have developed five guides explaining technologies like RSS, microblogging (twitter), podcasting and social media. Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts, with a useful accompanying short written guide covering potential uses, risks and how to get started.

Teacher training videos from Russell Stannard (principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster):
On this website you will find an extensive set of easy to follow training videos introducing YouTube, iTunes, online surveys (Survey Monkey), delicious, wikis, audacity, camtasia, blogging, and podcasting to name a few. Each title includes a number of short 1-3 minute video clips that you can watch in sequence or view just the parts you are interested in. Russell Stannard has a special interest in english language teaching and a separate collection of videos under that title.

Here's a good way for sharing web resources and reference material with your students using the RSS feeds tools available in Moodle. For example, you can collect bookmarks for your course in delicious (tagged with a name specific to your course) and then set up a feed into your Moodle course that automatically updates as you add more bookmarks.

Here's how to do it:

1. In your Moodle course click the Turn editing on button.
   
2. Find the Blocks editor and add a new 'Remote RSS feeds' block.
3. Click on the editing tool (hand tool) to configure the Feeds block.
4. Click on the 'Manage all my feeds' tab.
5. Find the RSS Feed logo on the website (that's the small orange square shown at the start of this post, labelled RSS or RSS Feed). Right click on the logo and select Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut. Paste into the space provided to Add a news feed URL. Click the Add button. This feed will now come up in the Feed block on this page.
6. Click on the Configure this block tab.
7. The feed should now be available to select (there may be several feeds shown here depending on how they have been configured in other courses), select your feed/s with a tick. Choose how you want to configure the feed, for example give it a title, provide each links description, and display a link to the original site. Click the Save changes button.
8. This feed will now be displayed and updated automatically in your course.

In tonights social media class Leigh said:

Have you been caught without your WYSIWYG editor yet? You know, when you're leaving a comment on someones blog, or trying to add a description to a photo and the text input box doesn't have the button for creating a link, making bold, or making italic.

Wondering about WYSIWYG? This is the editing toolbar where "what you see is what you get", (aha now the picture makes sense!). If the editor is lacking a few of the essentials you can still add links, formatting etc if you know a bit about html.

So we did a Google search for "what is the HTML for a link?" and W3 gave us all the details on how to do links and more.

Here's some info from W3:

HTML is a language for describing web pages:

• HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
• HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language
• A markup language is a set of markup tags

HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages:

• HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags
• HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angle brackets like <> but with no spaces between brackets and text
  
• HTML tags normally come in pairs like <> and < /b >The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
• Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags.

Angle brackets and key letters are just about all you need. We practiced links, bolding and italics by commenting on the social media blog, and turns out it's not as hard as it looks.
eg (but with no spaces between brackets and text)
< href="url">Link text< /a >
<>Italic text< /i >
<>Bold text< /b >
< scr="image url .jpg">

First, a quick check on wikipedia for delicious and social bookmarking.

What is Delicious?

"Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://delicious.com/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users." (Wikipedia, June 2009)

What is social bookmarking?

"Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".^[1] (Wikipedia June 2009)

Here's a YouTube video showing how to use delicious in the classroom.

So what is a google calendar?

Wikipedia has this to say about Google Calendars:

"Google Calendar is a free time-management web application offered by Google. It became available on April 13, 2006 and is currently in beta stages. While users are not required to have a Gmail account, they are required to have a free Google Account in order to use the software.

Google Calendar allows multiple calendars to be created and shown in the same view. They can also be easily shared, either read-only or with full control, and either with specified people only or with everyone. For example, make one shared calendar for each sports team or club, and a separate calendar for private events. Events from both show up side-by-side on the same calendar, in different colors."

That sounds handy! Here are the steps to set up your own Google calendar.

1. Log into Google.
2. Click the blue link on your google page to Calendar (up at the top).
3. Enter a few events to your calendar.
4. In the left navigation area under My Calendars, click the drop-down menu that is next to your name and then change the colour.
5. Click the same drop-down menu and select Calendar Settings. Change the name, NZ timezone etc. Don't copy the embed code yet. Instead click the link that says Customise colour, size and other options.
6. Adjust settings to a width of 400 pixels (not 800 so that it fits in your blog) and other settings to your liking.
7. Copy the embed code and paste as a new post in your blog.

If you are new to blogging or even not so new, Sue Waters (The Edublogger) provides some helpful technical pointers in her Top 5 mistakes made by new bloggers, with information about:

1. Copying and pasting text written in word into a blog post
2. Using copyright images in blog posts
3. Uploading images from digital cameras without resizing
4. Forgetting to link
5. Copying and pasting other bloggers posts

It's well worth a look, read through the comments as well for other bloggers feedback and extra hints.

A word about The Edublogger. It is "dedicated to helping educational bloggers with emerging technologies in education, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. It’s purpose is to share tips, tricks, ideas and provide help to the educational blogging community".

There's lots of useful information on this blog, see the Posts by Topic section down the right. If this sounds like it might be useful to you, then why not subscribe to it.

(Image: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3102/2627669442_ce269e9fb4.jpg, by jenny downing)

I am very disappointed to hear that the National Government has decided to cut funding for the highly successful Enviroschools programme. This programme supports schools to “integrate environmental education into the whole of school life” with the aim of creating “innovative and motivated young people, who instinctively think and act sustainably”. My family has been involved with Enviroschools for several years in Southland and Otago and have seen the positive benefits it has on children, parents and the wider community.

Today we are dealing with huge environmental problems created by our lack of understanding and sheer ignorance in the past, so it seems incredibly short-sighted of the Government to step away and undermine a successful programme that helps to instil environmental awareness and sustainable values in our children, with benefits that extend into the future as they become the adults of tomorrow. So, you have to wonder what the Governments motives are for taking this action to cut funding.

Amongst those who are worried about the Government’s decision are Nick Holmes and Guy Ryan (my nephew), who put together this great video ... “Enviroschools isn't just a kit, it's a part of lives and communities, and to show the importance of education for sustainability”. Nice work!