Adventures By Design

We think we’ve installed a plugin that will allow Wordpress and Facebook to talk to each other. Now, whenever we write on the blog it should show up in Facebook too (but just Gin’s account).

We’re not sure if it is actually working, so if this looks ugly or doesn’t work, sorry.

Yesterday, I continued our redesign (or at least revision) of our blog. There are a bunch of things I want to change, although I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to do so. I wonder if this sudden need to make our blog more user family-friendly is just an online version of the fabled Nesting Instinct.

This evening I’ve been trying to fix some features that have been on my list of things to figure out for a while (two biggies: adding albums of photos to posts, changing the google map to show our travels). I seem to be successful so far, but unfortunately our computer is running out of battery charge, and I’m not finished yet.

So, if something looks awful or doesn’t work properly, just wait a day or so and it should be back to normal.

Thanks.

Richard

Yesterday I received this email from my friend and colleague Mike Hopaluk:

Hey there,

Hope you are enjoying the weekend.
Question: did you pay the extra to have the ads turned off on your
class wikispace?
Ben and I are going to have the kids all have their own blogs next
year and I am looking around to find the best one for our purposes.
Any suggestion would be met with respect and bountiful ‘thank you”s.

Peace out

-Mike

Hi Mike. Thanks for asking me about this. I’m really excited to see what you and Ben do next year. I’ll provide you with advice based on my experiences with wikispaces with my grade fours this year. As you can see, I’ve taken your question as a great topic for a post on how to use wikis and blogs in the classroom.

Ok, the first thing to think about is how you are going to use your blogs and a wiki. I’d suggest using your student blogs as you have used your class message board: for all the day-to-day notices you want your students to share with their class. Remember, a blog is a timeline and changes daily (hourly), but there is only one author of each post. This is point-to-many, although with comments readers can reply and share their thoughts. A wiki is the opposite: use a wiki for collaboration as you explore projects as a class. This is many-to-many, and as people can all change the page, there are multiple authors, and little individual ownership of ideas. In my experience, while you use your blog everyday, your wiki will follow the ebbs and flows of the class and have periods of frenetic activity followed by dormancy.

Getting a wiki
If you want an education-related wiki, you can get one for free with no ads from Wikispaces. Wikispaces is bringing wikis to the education crowd, and so are giving away 100,000 subscriptions. There are other wiki services out there, but when I was deciding where to go, Wikispaces seemed like it was the easiest and most student-friendly. Plus, Wikispaces has a great community of teachers doing the same kinds of things that you are doing, and they openly collaborate to solve each others problems. Friendly, knowledgeable, and fun, it was like a virtual IT staffroom.

All the kids will need logins and passwords. Either they can sign up themselves (not recommended), or you can submit a list of your students’ login names, passwords, and email addresses. If (when) students forget their login or password, Wikispaces can automatically send them an email to help them. Including the email addresses is optional, but I will require it when I do this again. As many of my grade fours didn’t have an email address, I signed them up without emails. This created a huge headache for the rest of the year, as whenever they forgot their login or password, I had to email the support staff at Wikispaces who would then reset the password and email me back. Those folks are busy, and that took a week or more sometimes.

Getting a Blog
Just like with wikis, there are numerous blog services. I used Blogspot a couple years ago and found it easy to use, but not very flexible. I’d stay away, especially now that I know what WordPress has to offer. Wordpress is easy to use, yet robust blogging software. It has lots of themes (push a button and instantly change the entire appearance of your blog), and plugins and widgets (think: tiny programs that extend what WordPress does: for example, calendars, maps, Flickr).

You can get a WordPress blog for free from Edublogs.org. They are an education-specific blogging service that uses WorPress Multiuser (WPMU). I haven’t used this site because until a few months ago, I didn’t know they existed. But they seem to do for blogging what Wikispaces does for wikis, and I’d suggest giving them a shot.

One more thing: using any hosted site is a trade-off between convenience and flexibility. You will only be able to control certain things about your blog, and many features may not be available to you. This may be enough for you, however remember that if you ever get frustrated that your blog doesn’t have some feature you want, you also have the option to have create your own WordPress blog. There are many hosting companies that will charge on $7-10/month to host your blog, giving you complete control over your blog(s) and what it does. You also are the person responsible when things go wrong. I wouldn’t recommend this option unless you find a need for something more than Edublogs can provide, but keep it in mind.

Using your Blog + Wiki
How you use your student blogs and wiki will be an evolving question as your class becomes more familiar with them. Obviously you should provide a link from one to the other, but you can also dynamically join them together using RSS feeds. Basically, an RSS feed is a way to monitor when a webpage (i.e. wiki or blog) changes. Both wikispaces and edublogs support RSS, which means that your students could embed their blog’s feed into a wiki, and the wiki’s feed into their blogs. Here’s one suggestion: make a homepage on your wiki that acts as a directory to all the projects you have going on the wiki. Add to this a section that shows the latest RSS feeds from your student blogs; think of it as display of the class’s current events. Now on the blogs, do the opposite. Make a section that shows the “most recent changes” of the wiki.

I hope this helps you. Good luck with this new adventure, and let’s keep in touch and help each other.

Richard

PS: If you are interested, I’ve got a list of all the special things you can embed in a wiki. Look here for a list of some of the things you can do.

As you can see, our blog looks a little different. For the past few weeks I’ve been redesigning the way our blog looks, using Chris Pearson’s original Cutline Theme as my starting point. Actually, if you compare the two, you will see that most of the changes I made were cosmetic – things like changing the colours and fonts, with the exception of the way the post title, author, and date display. Cutline made this super easy to do because it has two style sheets: the complete normal one, and custom one. To customize the look of the blog, all a person has to do is add or modify the custom style sheet, and their changes will automatically replace the normal one. If that makes no sense to you, think of it as a safety net: the complete style is there under the surface, ready to leap into action if when I do something wrong.

I’m happy with our blog now. I’ve got a sense of accomplishment, plus I’ve learned all kinds of new skills. Although it may be too ambitious to create my own theme (although I’d love to someday), I feel confident that I can take other themes and modify them to suit my (or others’) needs (cough, Janet). I’m surprised at how active the WordPress community is: there are thousands of folks are out there volunteering their time and knowledge to help others. It’s great! And like Firefox and Wikipedia, WordPress shows that you don’t need a gianormous budget, nor a vertical organizational structure to achieve quality results.

I like the overall color scheme. These were the colors we choose several months ago when we first started working on our professional teaching portfolio (take a look if you are curious; it should be finished in the next couple days).

I like the way many blogs display the post date in a small box beside the post’s title. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, even though looking back it seems simple. It wasn’t until I dissected HeyLucy that I really got it. I wonder if not putting the year is going to bit me on the nose later on?

The images in the header will randomly change every time you load the page. Nifty, eh? Refresh (Ctrl+R) your browser to see a different photo. I figure I’ve got hundreds thousands of photos that I’m not doing a whole lot with, so why not put them to work? Watch out for Nathan making a guest appearance, and a post-nuclear downtown Seoul.

Now I need your help. If there is anything that doesn’t work properly, or look right, please tell me! Please. I’ve done my best to find all the bugs, but I know I’ve missed some. While you’re at it, if there is anything that you’d like to see added or changed, please tell me that too.

Ok, I’m off to bed now… 2:30am. Not bad, considering it was 4:00am last night.

I know it’s been a while since we last posted. Simply put, we’ve been busy alternating between two extremes: sitting around doing nothing much, and working feverishly to complete our online teaching portfolio and our customized WordPress theme. Both are almost complete, and our goal is to have our grand unveiling on Monday (used here, grand is a relative term as it refers to the three people who actually read our blog).