Tag: Blogger

Posting from Create-a-Graph to a Posterous Blog (and Blogger too)

Blogging, Maths, My classPublished onUpdated on2 Comments on Posting from Create-a-Graph to a Posterous Blog (and Blogger too)

One of the nice features of the Create-a-Graph site from the NCES is the ability to email the completed chart. In the past I have used this when working with Google Apps for Edu – the children handed their work in to me by sending it to my school email. We had my inbox open on the board so the children could see their submissions.

We have been using Posterous as our class blog platform since September. It is a fantastic site for school or class blogging due to it’s simplicity. I made the link with Create-a-Graph because Posterous is built around being able to email content to a specific address which will then post to the blog.

In a nutshell I have worked out a way for my children to post their charts and graphs from Create-a-Graph directly to the class blog.

Here is how to do it.

**Requirements – the following instructions are only for a Posterous blog, but the idea will work if you have a Blogger site. You can find the email you need in your Blogger “Settings” under “Email & Mobile”. If you have a post via email option for your blogging platform in theory this should also work**

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1. Send a graph from Create-a-Graph to your own email. Now locate the sender’s email address – it should be something like kidszone@ed.gov

2. By default a Posterous blog only allows agreed contributors to post – you need to make kidszone@ed.gov a contributor to your blog, basically saying content from that source is OK.

3. Go to the Settings of your Posterous account and click on Contributors, add a new contributor and paste the email address we have for Create-a-Graph: kidszone@ed.gov

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4. Now you are ready to post from Create-a-Graph (worth testing this before the kids get a go) – the email you need is the one for contributors as the additional email you have added is not recognised as the primary one for the site. The email address you will need will be at the bottom of the Contributors page (see screenshot above)

5. Add this email into the Create-a-Graph “email this graph” box (leave it as html) and hit send.

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6. Your graph should be posted – the nice thing about Posterous is that it will automatically resize the image to suit your blog, which saves a lot of fiddling around with multiple posts. Here is an example blog post we did this week from someone in my class, we were looking at the climate of Australia.

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That is pretty much the top and bottom of it – for Blogger just use your unique email address in step 5. Over the period of time we have done this I have a few tips to share:

  • Expect to have multiple posts, children click send numerous times as they are unsure it has been done – it takes a bit of tidying up. (I also take a few moments to add the children’s names as tags to the posts so that I am collating work on the class blog)
  • Ask the children to add their name to the Graph Title in Create-a-Graph – this is under Data. The graph title will appear as the blog post title and will now include the child’s name for you to see who owns it easily.

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  • If you display the blog refreshing on the board you can check work quickly and children can have the reassurance their work has been submitted.
  • Once submitted the children can still edit their graphs – if you see something you need them to change, delete the post and ask them to correct it and resend.

I hope you find that an interesting tip to perhaps try – good luck with it and let me know how you get on.

Class Blogging – Joining Up the Dots

Blogging, Google, My classPublished onUpdated on5 Comments on Class Blogging – Joining Up the Dots

When I first began my own blog nearly four years ago I also had set up a class site too. We had a year of great fun and connections. The experience made me realise how easy it is for classrooms to have a global dimension through the power of this technology. No doubt many of you with class blogs experienced this realisation too.

I have had a fantastic week returning to classroom blogging and starting our new class blog >> Priestsic5. Before Christmas I wrote a post asking for teachers to share their experiences with class blogs. To explain what platform they were using and to share some reasons behind it’s use. As you can see from the link I have decided to use Blogger as our platform.

Why Blogger?

The two main reasons are ease of use and sustainability, and I think that the former directly effects the latter. I want the blog to be a well established feature of the classroom and for it to be sustained into the future. Blogger is extremely easy to setup especially if you have some blogging experience of your own – but even if you have not.

One big plus is the associated services and tools that can be utilised alongside your Blogger (Google) account. The most important is perhaps image hosting in the form of Picasa Web Albums. Used alongside the desktop Picasa 3 application it is a good solution. Amongst other things I can blog directly from Picasa, synchronise local image folders to the web automatically and upload photo videos directly to YouTube.

Synchronise

Just to unpick the image folder synchronisation a little further – on our blog I have created an Art Gallery slideshow in the sidebar. I want this to be a collection of all that the class create and so I will be regularly updating the set of images. Currently all I have to do to add another image to this slideshow is add it to a local folder on my class computer – that’s it. I think this is a really useful feature as we are often managing lots of images from a whole class set of work. Using the Art Gallery example here’s how to do it:

  1. Upload you images to your computer, Picasa should automatically pick these up and display them for upload.
  2. Create an Art Gallery folder for the images (usually done during upload process)
  3. In Picasa next to the folder, on the right hand side of the screen, click the Sync to Web button.
  4. Sign in to your Google account.
  5. Your images will be uploaded to a web album.
  6. Click on the newly created online  album – click on “Link to this Album” in the right sidebar.
  7. Select “Embed Slideshow” and copy the code.
  8. Paste this code in your blog. For ours I used “Add Gadget” (HTML/Javascript type) from the Layout settings.
  9. Save and refresh your blog to check it is working OK – you can manually change the size in the code.
  10. Now every time you add an image to the original local folder (on your computer) it will automatically update to the web and consequently update your slideshow too.

In the remainder of the post I will be explaining a few additions and changes I have made to our class blog that I consider to be important.

Next Blog Link

One of the features of a blog with Blogger is the top navigation bar that appears. This has a “Next Blog” link button which takes you to a random blog. Naturally this is not ideal for a class blog as you have no control over what you are linking to.

The first thing I did was find out how to remove it. It is a pretty simple case of adding a small piece of CSS code to the Template code. I found this site’s explanation exactly what I needed. Here is a short screencast from the same website illustrating the process:


Remove Blogger Navbar – More free videos are here

How Many Visitors?

By simply tracking the number of visitors you are able to illustrate to your class that we have an audience. There are people out their in the world reading what we post. These numbers are important in helping you establish rules for writing posts and comments. Children have a better appreciation that their work is going to be viewed by more than just “us”. A visible visitor counter like StatCounter provides some useful analytics for your blog that you could use in maths further down the line

Dots on a Map

In my experience one of the greatest ways to hook your class into the use of the class blog is to display a map of your visitors. In the past and in the last week I have found this to be a great focal point for the class when they are looking at the blog. I have used ClustrMaps for years on my own blog and with classblogs.

priestsic5.blogspotIt is simply a case of creating an account and then embedding a short piece of code in a blog sidebar. After 12 hours or so the map will begin to be populated with visitor dots. It is these simple marks on a map that become points of intrigue for the children in your class. After 24 hours of our own blog we had about 400 hits – I displayed the full screen map and just listened to the children pointing at the different countries and chatting about where their visitors were from. There was a buzz of excitement.

There is something so powerful and yet so simple and wonderful in allowing your class to realise that those little dots are people who have just visited your blog and read about work you do in your classroom. They begin to realise the connections we can make and begin to develop an awareness of things beyond their own community.

I know it is only a little map, but it really is a powerful aspect of class blogs and I would strongly recommend you display something too. Can you think of any other way that your class would willingly look at a world map every day and ask questions about where places are? Have your class blog displayed when the children come in first thing and leave room for their geographical curiosity to shine through. What you do with that natural curiosity afterwards is up to you!