I have arrived - at last!!

Hi All

I am a new user and am here to help as best I can with any technical or non-technical questions.

And unfortunately there is nothing I can do about the weight of the new laptops, I apologise for those of you that have inherted a brick!!

Educational Websites and Blogs

It occurred to me that it might be worth putting some links to educational or interesting websites and blogs. I have added these beneath the Blog Archive.

Let me know if you know of a website or blog that is a useful or is a good example of use in education, or which might be of interest or help to other members of staff - and I'll add it.

Adding labels to posts

I've added 'labels' to some of the posts so far. This will make it easier for people to search the blog for something. They are easy to add, just put them in at the bottom of the Post.

Put in a keyword, if something similar is already in there then you will get a list to choose from.

Posting Word and PowerPoint to Blogger

The simple answer is that Blogger has disabled a simple upload of the documents to your blog. It is very easy to upload pictures (jpg, gif, bmp and png), but Word and PowerPoint are a little harder. I believe that this is because of security issues. Office documents can have program code embedded in them, which can be used to make malicious attacks on the servers hosting Blogger.

However, it is possible to upload your documents to the Internet, using Google Docs, which you can then link to from your blog. As a member of Blogger you already have a Google account which you need for Google Docs.

I had never done this before, so I've done it now, and uploaded a document to tell you how to do it:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=drd54bk_34fw4xsrcs

This has been set up so that anyone may view it. It is not limited to members of this blog.

I hope this is of help, if you need more information, or the presentation itself isn't completely clear, please get back to me.
CJF

Hello everyone!
Cath, I've had a go at setting up an RE teachers' blog for Herts. But is it possible to add powerpoints or word documents to a blog? If it is, can you tell me how?

new user

Hi, just to all of you out there I am a new member.

Anything you think I need to know tell me please!!

Correction!

The next meeting of the T&L group is Wednesday 10th December!

One giant leap for PN!

Thanks to all who attended last night's T&L group meeting.
What happened?
RC gave us a demo of the Geography blog and provided help with regard to starting blogging
CF showed us her ICT blog and has set up this T&L blog
PN referred to the AfL audit, reminding everyone of the task in hand - to complete this audit for your own subject area - this is now available electronically in the T&L folder on the Staff Shared Area
Next meeting: Wednesday 12th December 4 p.m.
Agenda:
V.L.E.
Gathering together the AfL audit

Blogging for teaching and learning

We had another meeting of the Assessment for Learning group this afternoon. We looked at the use of the Geography blog with years 12 and 13, for the dissemination of information to students, as well as the assessments of their comments to gauge understanding. This is a closed blog, visible only to members, so we cannot post a link.

In ICT we are experimenting with the use of a blog with 2 top set year 9 groups. The students have only been doing this for a few weeks, and only have one hour a week ICT, however, at the moment the results are very promising. The purpose was to get the students to use a variety of different means of electronic communication, view a wide range of samples of each others' work, and to make constructive comments on each others' work to help sharpen their critical facilities for their own work. In general the students find it very difficult to assess and suggest improvements for their own work, however; by reviewing the work of others they get practice at the skills. Future plans include: use of the on-line site SlideShare to share their presentations and setting targets for themselves for this year.

To emphasise the importance of on-line safety students have not been allowed to use personal names, photos of themselves or include any personal information in their profiles.

You can see their progress here.