Educators have contacted us asking for email copies of our Teacher Challenge posts as they’re finding email is the best way to sharing them with their local teachers.

It’s great to know you’re finding these posts helpful!

So we thought you might like to see how easy it is to send emails of our posts from the Teacher Challenge blog.

Here’s how you do it:

1.  Go to the post you want to email.

For example, to send an email copy of  ”Activity 1: Getting your class blog started – Create blog and customize look” you go to:

http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/2012/07/30/activity-1-getting-your-class-blog-started/

2.  Click on the Print PDF icon.

3.  Click on PDF.

4.  Click on “Download your PDF” to save a PDF copy of the post on your computer.

5.   Attach the PDF to an email to share with others.

The alternative is to use the email option on the Print PDF screen however emailing it as a PDF is more obvious than teachers realising they need to click on the link in the email.

Below is what the email option from the Print PDF screen looks like:

The plugins we use to help teachers easily share our posts are:

1. Print Friendly and PDF plugin - Optimize your pages for print and let your readers download or email a PDF version of your posts or pages.
2. AddThis Social Share plugin – Places Facebook like, Twitter, email and other sharing icons on your posts.

These can be activated in Plugins and you can read more about other plugin options here.

Here are links to all the posts in our latest series on class blogging:

• Activity 1: Getting Your Class Blog Started
• Activity 2: Setting up pages – About, Blogging Guidelines and Contact
• Activity 3: Writing your first posts – What you need to know
• Activity 4: Writing comments – What you need to know
• Activity 5: Working with Widgets – What you need to know
• Activity 6: Helping parents and students connect with your class blog
• Activity 7: Fair use, copyright, and intro to using images
• Activity 8: Cool tools for enhancing your blog posts
• Activity 9: Connecting with other classes
• Activity 10: Setting up your student blogs

You’ll find our other Teacher Challenge series here:

• Challenge 1: Personal Blogging
• Challenge 2: Student Blogging
• Challenge 3: Free Web tools
• Challenge 4:  Building your PLN

As we continue on with the current Teacher Challenge on class blogging, preparations are already underway for the next series.

This time, we want to introduce users to as many of the best free web tools as we can!

And that is where you come in. Do you have a favorite web tool of any kind that you would like to share?

We’re looking for guest bloggers to:

• Write a post that provides an overview of the tool
• Include a “challenge” where readers are encouraged to use the tool and somehow demonstrate the end result
• Help answer any questions that might come up from challenge particpants

No need to have a blog or even be an Edublogs user to participate. This would be a great way to help fellow educators from around the globe – and maybe add more twitter followers or blog readers to your list as well.

What do you think? Any takers?

Leave a comment below or contact us here and we’ll get you hooked up with all that you need!

We hope you enjoyed our first Teacher Challenge series with 30 days to kick start your blogging. We’ll be monitoring the comments and anyone is welcome to continue with the challenges even after we’re officially on to another one.

And now, starting this Monday the 14th is 30 days to get your students blogging!

This challenge is open to anyone and everyone – and you don’t need to be a user of Edublogs at all or have participated in the first challenge.

Especially geared for those that want to have their student participate in the Student Blogging Challenge that is starting in March, gear up and get ready to learn:

• The educational and curricular benefits of student blogging
• Choosing a blogging platform
• Setting up the accounts
• Managing and following student bloggers
• Teaching blogging skills and etiquette
• And much, much more!

To keep up with the challenges and tasks as they are announced, just do one or more of the following:

1. Like Edublogs on Facebook
2. Follow Edublogs on Twitter
3. Subscribe to the RSS feed by email

Happy blogging!

Many of you have signed up to be notified of our latest posts by email.

Unfortunately some of you have been having trouble because we didn’t warn you that things like images and objects that we embed are removed in emails.

So if you are currently reading this post by email we need you to immediately visit the Teacher Challenge blog NOW and read the post online!

We want to:

1. Show you the difference between reading this post online and reading it in an email
2. Give you tips for getting more out of reading our email subscriptions

The great thing about email subscriptions is your automatically sent an email when a new post is written on the Teacher Challenge blog.

But when you receive the email we need you to:

1. Read the content
2. Look to see if there are any images or embeds that might be missing
3. Check out the hyperlinks that send you to websites where you can read  further information

Here’s an example.

Below is a portion of the email subscription asking if bloggers want a mentor.

In this email the Google Doc we used to sign up for a mentor was an embed and it was automatically removed from the email.

What you needed to do in this case was visit the post on the blog.

Here’s how to visit the post:

Look at the heading of the email. It is in blue and underlined.

Anything that is blue and underline indicates it is a hyperlink.  When you click on a hyperlink in the email it will take you to that website.

To visit the original post you just need to click on the heading at the top of the email.

In this case you would click on “Do you want a mentor for this challenge?”

Links in email newsletters

And you would see this post:

Then to find the form and ask  for a mentor, all you need to do scroll down until you see the Google form and add your details.

Click on the submit button, when finished filling in the form.

And have you noticed?

While reading this post on the Teacher Challenge blog we hope you’ve been comparing it to the version you received by email!

Have you noticed how the images are missing in the email?  And you can see them in the post?

When in doubt always drop past the post to make sure there isn’t any important instructions in images you need to see.

And off course, if you are now reading our posts by RSS — you no longer need to worry   Images and most embeds aren’t removed when you read posts by RSS using Google Reader.