PortablePD.ca

Hello Nathan!

I’m a Grade 7/8 Teacher from Thamesville, Ontario. I’ve recently started a class blog (http://www.jpepper.edublogs.org) (January 2009) and have stumbled across yours. You have an excellent blog and have some very creative students. After March Break, my class will be starting to work on podcasting. I’ve noticed your class has some podcasts as well.

I have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind answering:

1) Is portableradio.ca a place where I could eventually upload my students’ podcasts or is it your site?

2) I noticed on your blog [5nt.ca] that beside each student’s name in brackets is the number of posts they have. How do I get this application to work on my blog?

Thanks for your time.

Jason

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Jason Pepper
Good Shepherd Catholic School
Thamesville, ON

Hi Jason,

I’ll do my best to answer your questions:

1) Is portableradio.ca a place where I could eventually upload my students’ podcasts or is it your site?

Portableradio.ca is the blog that my class (5nt.ca) and Jane Smith’s class of grade 5/6 students (56js.ca) share as our podcast site. The site is designed to showcase the podcasts made by the two classes.

The portableradio.ca site runs off of Edublogs.org.  I see that you are using Edublogs for your blog as well.  You can upload your sound to your blog but the free version limits you to 20MB which very roughly translates into about 25 minutes of mp3 audio.  I put together a video tutorial on how you do that.

If you get hooked on this stuff, you will want to find more storage space.  One options is to become an Edublogs supporter and receive 5GB of storage ($). Or, your school might have its own website for uploading audio.  Once you’ve done uploaded the audio, figure out its URL and link to it from your Edublogs blog.

2) I noticed on your blog [5nt.ca] that beside each student’s name in brackets is the number of posts they have. How do I get this application to work on my blog?

Here’s what Jason is referring to:

I see that your students each have their own blog and you have them listed under “Blogroll’ which, in effect, is a list of links to separate websites.  I don’t know of a way to make the number of posts they write on their individual blogs show up on yours.

In my case, I’ve elected for my students not to have their own blogs. My students contribute to the one blog. That way, I can moderate all posts and comments. I’ve set each student as “Contributor” and list their names as categories. Whenever they write a post, they check off their name a pull-down menu of categories.  Click here for more information about how we set this up. I have a suspicion that some of the things we talk about in this document may now require you becoming an Edublogs supporter ($)

Here’s how I made the number of posts written by each student appear. In your Edublogs dashboard go to “Design” and select “Widgets”.  If you haven’t already, drag over the “Categories” widget into your sidebar.  Click on “edit” and check “Show Post Counts”. Remember this only works with the “Category” widget and not “Blogroll”.

I hope that was useful.  Let us know when your podcast is “live” on the internet.  We’d love to add a link to it here on our PortablePD.ca site.

Frequent visitors to PortablePD.ca will be familiar with our screencasts.  Screencasts are movies of your desktop and come in handy when explaining how to deal with software and websites.  Jing offers free and very easy to use software for creating such movies.

Until recently, we weren’t able to embed these screencasts directly into our blog.  Instead we would have create a link to another website.  Being self-centred types, Jane and I much prefer to keep our readers on our site at all times!

Predictably enough, I’ve created this screencast explaining how to embed it into a post.

Click here to see a larger version (or right click to download it).

This post has been written on “Using tools like VoiceThread, Voki, mystudiyo, Animoto, SlideShows, Google Documents with students and embedding in blogs posts” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition.

This post won!

It just goes to show that the simple act of asking for something might, on occasion, get you what you want.

In my case I decided to leave a post on the Edublogs forums asking for audio and video comments for the blogs.  And, lo and behold, one day later, I got what I asked for.

Have fun trying it out.  Assuming you have a microphone and/or webcam connected to your computer you are good to go.  Start by clicking on “no responses yet” or “45 responses so far” after this (or any) post.  Then scroll to the bottom of the page and select either “Add Webcam Comment” or “Add Audio-only Comment”.  Click “Allow” and then close the window before recording your message. You can still leave a typed message along with the audio and video. Video, audio and typed comments continue to be moderated by Jane Smith and me.

I look forward to literally hearing, and seeing, what you have to say!

We recently received a question about how to create a student login on our edublogs blog.

Here’s a screencast on that very topic:

Click here for a larger version

We have been learning about procedural writing in my grade 5/6 class. We have read a number of “How tos” and looked at the characteristics of this form of writing. As a culminating task for this work, the students wrote their own directions on how to do something. I am always surprised by the ideas that they come up with. We learned “How to Get Grounded”, “How to Give a Perfect Manicure”, “How to Check for Monsters Under the Bed”, to name a few. These short pieces of writing lend themselves really well to being included on a podcast. They are short, entertaining and offer the students another way of sharing their work without making podcasting an add on activity.

The real teachable moment in all of this came when, during our writing period, a glazier arrived in our portable to fix our broken window. One of my students immediately came up with the idea to interview our visitor about his job and how he does his work. Having the digital recorder in the classroom meant that we were able to take advantage of this opportunity. We learned about all the steps involved in taking the glass out, cutting glass, replacing the glass and sealing the window. Along with my class I learned about the glazier’s job and the students taught him a bit about podcasting. You can hear the results of this encounter at our student produced podcast PortableRadio.ca – Episode 3 Season 3.

Another window of opportunity for Nathan and me has come with the “Edublog Best Group Blog” nomination. We are both very pleased (and a bit surprised) to get this honour. This nomination has given PortablePd.ca a little more “press”. Our goal with this site has been to get the word out and to provide support for teachers who are interested in podcasting without having to reinvent the wheel. We would appreciate your support in this. You can vote by clicking here.

….continuing the conversation.

It was quite a surprise to find our site listed as a finalist in the 2008 Edublogs Awards.  We are one of 16 blogs nominated in this category. Here are the other fifteen:

Salford University Occupational Therapy Education blog
SCC English
WorkLiteracy
The Stratford Sentinel
Mortarboard Blog
Pontydysgu
Brandon Hall Research Workplace Learning Today
Scholastic News Blog
Digital Learning Environments
Tomorrow’s Trust
The Chancellor’s New Clothes
ECO group
360
Leader Talk
Youth Voices

It’s quite a group to be associated with- kind of humbling, actually.

You can vote for “best group blog” here.  There are lots of other blogs to check out and vote on as well.

I am writing this post in the hopes that other educational bloggers out there will add to a discussion in order to provide information for people who are thinking about getting into blogging with their classes about which provider to sign on with.

We (obviously) use Edublogs. Edublogs has just undergone a massive makeover. Last week was quite rocky. The service was up and down while they worked out the bugs. They are very good at communicating when they will do work but I think they were a bit blind sided by how much work the makeover would be. If you had asked me early last week about Edublogs I would have told you to avoid it like the plague but this week the sun is shining again.

I find it very easy to manage the blog and have actually abandoned my website and now just use the blog. Setting up student accounts is getting easier and I like how I can post from any computer anywhere – unlike my website. It means that I can post daily and my students are doing some of their writing from home.

I also like the fact that edublogs is a free service that is advertising free. I don’t like sending my families or students to sites that post commercials.

Another plus is that it is really easy to upload pictures and video to the site. Nathan has provided a video tutorial on how to upload a google calendar to the site. I am interested in coding and the background mumbo jumbo on how these things work so I appreciate how easy it is to manage and modify the blog.

I look forward to seeing comments about other blog providers. If you would like to see my classroom blog please visit 56j.ca

We recently received a question about how to embed Google calendars into your blog.  Here’s a screencast showing how to do just that, at least if you are using Edublogs.

Click here to see a larger version.

If you would prefer to learn how to embed by reading – check out this How To Embed a Google Calendar in a Blog Page! (Thanks Sue Waters for the link).

Jeff Siderius, a Grade 4 Teacher at Dunlop Public School had the following question about my class blog:

How did you set up your students as contributors on Edublogs?  Did you get email addresses for all of them?  Or, did you use the linked gmail addresses that I’ve been reading about, using one email address for your class?

Click here to open a PDF, complete with snazzy screenshots, to see an explaination of how things were set up.

NOTE:  You now have to be an Edublogs Supporter ($) in order for all of this to work.

Click here for a tutorial on how to do this if you are not an Edublogs Supporter.

A few teachers in our board discovered ads embedded in their Edublogs blogs a few weeks ago.  Here’s an exchange that took place over our board’s computer contact teacher forum:

Hiya,

We’ve got a class blog, and one parent has written to me a few times saying they’re seeing ads for diets, lesbian dating, etc. on the left side of our blog.  I’ve never seen any ads on edublogs on any of the computers I’ve used – home or work.    Our site is 45keeling.edublogs.org

Anyone else have this problem, or have any suggestions for me?  Don’t want this parent to continue to get these ads/complain, but not sure what to do!

Shannon

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Hi,

I’m using Edublogs as well and personally witnessed what the parent was talking about (and lived to tell the tale…) on my class blog. It happened one day last week and, thankfully, has not happened since.

I found mention to this issue in their forums:

Hi Guys,

Apologies for this, it was a bug in our system and should be fixed now, we have been experimenting with (extremely occasional) advertising in order to support Edublogs and you can find more information here.

It should be fixed up now.

Cheers, James

However, I just discovered if I searched for my class blog on Google (i.e. search “56nt edublogs”) and follow the link, the advertising is back.  Going directly to my site by type its URL (http://grade5nt.edublogs.org/) results in no advertising.

We’ll have to watch closely how this plays out.

Nathan

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I had noticed this too, but as mentioned it only seems to happen when finding the blog via a Google search. I just tested it by doing a google search for my class blog and when I clicked on the link, it was full of advertisements. When I hit F5 to refresh the screen, the advertisements went away.

Marc

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I tried it going through the URL, no ads, then through Google, ads this morning, no ads this afternoon. I am going to keep an eye on it, and also contact Edublogs if I get ads again. Has anyone else contacted Edublogs?

Thanks,

Barb

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I think that once you view the site without ads, it will automatically go back to that version unless you delete the cookies on your browser (which is why you didn’t get ads this afternoon). For example, I brought up the version with ads this morning through a google search, then I refreshed the screen to bring it up without ads. When I just did a google search again, and clicked on the link…it came up without ads. BUT, when I cleared the cookies in my browser and did a new search with google, it came up with ads again.

Marc