Some of our teachers prefer a more basic blog to use to communicate with parents and students. They don’t need all the bells and whistles of Edublogs. I’m recommending that these teachers use our Tiger Blog tool available through our web-based Tiger Mail. This software is hosted locally on one of our servers. You will find it to be very dependable, fast, and easy to use. If you can send an email, you can do this.

Here are a few example blogs published by Willard Teachers:

• Mrs. Lock’s Blog
• WMS Volley Tigers
• China Project
• Computer Skills 2

I have published a short Tiger Blog handout and set of screencasts. To view a screencast click the title below:

• Creating a blog and choosing your settings
• Submitting a post using email
• Submitting a post using Tiger Blog software
• Editing or deleting a post

If you need further assistance with using the Tiger Blogging tool, please let me know.

Image Credit: Britain Going Blog Crazy by Annie Mole

UPDATE 8/30: It appears that the issue has been resolved. Edublogs emails should be deliverable to our school email addresses. Yippee!!

It appears that our email spam filter, which is through MOREnet, and which we have no control over, has started blocking messages from Edublogs.

• This means if you register for an Edublogs account with your school email address, you will not get the email you need to verify your account and complete the registration process.
• This means if you have an existing Edublogs account that you created with your school email address, you won’t receive any emails pertaining to comments awaiting moderation on your blog or informational messages for Edublogs.

Ugghhh!

The only solution I have at this point is to use a different email address. Many of us have additional email accounts through our home Internet providers, or through free services such as gmail, yahoo, or hotmail. If you don’t, watch this short screencast on how to register for a gmail account.

• New Users: Use an alternative email address when registering for Edublogs, not your school email address.
• Existing Users: Edit the email address for your Edublogs account. You need to change it in 2 places. 1) Click the Setting link in the top right corner and change your email address. When you click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen, your email address will revert back to school email. But after you receive the verification email in your non-school email account, and click the provided click, it will be changed. 2) Click Users in the top right corner and then choose Your Profile from the menu bar across the top. Change your email address here as well.

This means that all emails from Edublogs will be delivered to your nonschool email account. Which is not ideal but doable. Many email services provide the option to forward copies of incoming emails to another email account. You can view this screencast on forwarding Edublogs emails to your school account that are addressed to your gmail account.

Maybe the setting on the MoreNET email spam filter will be changed in the near future to allow messages from Edublogs. Until that time, we can use this work around.

UPDATE: Please read this post from James Farmer on his blog incorporated subversion.

You may have noticed that your Edublogs’ Visual Editor is missing the Embed Flash and the Media buttons. These buttons are no longer need. Which is good news. The sky’s the limit on what we can now embed. The embedding process is now even easier, but with a quark.

Sue Waters, The Edublogger, provides step-by-step directions for embedding flash or media in an Edublogs’ post. An important tip she shared recommends pasting the embed code as the last step before publishing. Clicking Save and Continue Editing button may break the code and cause your embed not to display. Embed then publish, embed then publish, embed then publish. Got it?

tag: k12, edtech, blogging, Edublogs, embedding, flash, media, Sue Water, The Edublogger

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when my attempt to embed a Google Gadget in an Edublog’s post was successful. I didn’t anticipate it working, since the embedding of javascript and other code directly in a post has been disabled due to security concerns. After having a little time to read some RSS feeds last night, I see that Edublogs now allows you to embed javascript, iframes, and object code. You can just copy the provided embedding code, click the code tab while composing a post, and paste. This will also work in text box sidebar widgets. See Sue Water’s Edublogger post with some Tom Barrett’s screenshots illustrating the process.

Tips

• If you click the Visual tab after pasting in the code and don’t see anything where you embedded the object, that’s to be expected. It will show up when you publish or preview.
• Sue Waters recommends pasting in the code as the last step before publishing. As Mr. Farmer explains, if you edit and resave a post with embedded object code, it will break the code. He is hoping to fix this bug soon.
• Sue Waters also states that if you are embedding flash (swf) or a video, you should still use the toolbar buttons on the Visual tab. See the examples on Edublogger, along with the screenshots of how to embed a VoiceThread or Animato presentation.

I know of several teachers who will be thrilled with this new feature.
tag: k12 edtech Edublogs code javascript embedding widgets Sue Waters Tom Barrett James Farmer

Image Credit: Greasemonkey by xrrr

Download Video: Posted by leelefever at TeacherTube.com.

tags: blogging blog k12 edtech commoncraft Lee LeFever