As we have people still taking part in the earlier challenges of #ksyb, I will continue to create one of these posts for the next couple of weeks.
If you have been taking part in the whole challenge and have not yet been mentioned in these ‘Posts of the Week’ please leave a comment on this post with the URL of your blog, so I can come and visit.
Yet more great posts to read and comment on. Often you have to remember to right click on the person’s name and open in a new tab or window. Because I always set my links to open in a new tab, you only have to click on the names in my posts.
Posts for the earlier challenges – please visit these new bloggers and leave comments
This post is part of the beginners series for 30 Days to Kick Start Your Blogging. You don’t have to have ever published a “post” before, or maybe you’ve started to blog once or twice but haven’t quite yet stuck with it.
Wherever you’re at — we’ll step you through the tasks designed to increase your skills while providing mentors who’ll support your learning. Don’t stress, have fun and remember to ask for help, by leaving a comment, any time you need assistance!
This series is focused on helping educators set up their own personal / professional educator blogs. Check out Blogging with Students if you want to work through our series designed to help you set up student and class blogs!
The aim of this activity is to show you how to use a range of online tools to enhance posts and pages.
Click on a link below to go to the section you want to work on:
Why educators enhance posts with interactive tools
If you look closely at blogs you’ll notice many of them add cool interactive tools to their blog post.
They do this because things like slides, videos, comic strips, quizzes, polls in blog posts grab attention, engage and create opportunities for interaction in ways not achievable using plain text and images.
There’s a gazillion online tools nowadays and most of them provide code that you can use to embed what you’ve found or created into your blog posts or pages.
Try this embedded AnswerGarden to see how much fun they can be:
Wallwishers - an online notice board creator. It’s a really fast and easy way to create engaging activities to use with students. Learn more about Wallwisher here.
Prezi – is an online presentation and story telling tool that uses a single canvas instead of traditional series of slides. The images, text, videos and other objects are placed on the canvas and users can zoom in and out. Here’s a Prezi embedded in a blog post.
SlideShare – A site where you can host your presentations and share with others. Ideal for those who want to embed Presentations in their posts and websites rather than upload their PowerPoints directly and insert as a link. It’s also an excellent site for locating Presentations created by others. Check out a SlideShare embedded in a blog post here!
Scribd – allows you to upload your MS Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints and then share them within an embedded viewer on your blog. Here’s an example of a Scribd embedded in a blog post – check out the Scribd as it contains cool tips for backing up your blog!’
Flickr – Flickr is a PhotoSharing website for hosting and sharing your photos online. SlideShows of photo sets or tags can be embedded into blog posts.
Here’s some of the popular site used by educators who want to embed their videos within embedded players rather than uploading them directly to posts as links.
Some embed code is designed to be embedded into normal websites and can be too wide for the width of blog post.
Ideal width for embedding for most blog themes is 450 pixels wide.
If the online tool doesn’t provide the ability to adjust the embed size you can often do this by editing the code yourself. All you need to do is try adjusting the scale, width and/or height after you’ve added it to your post.
Now we’ve talked about embedding media it’s time for you to get creative while showing us your skills by writing a blog post that includes some embedded media.
Remember— if your blog doesn’t allow you to embed into your blog posts you’ll need to link to it.
Here’s some ideas of what you might like to write about or do:
Test a few of the online tools and write a review of them. What did you like? What did you find hard? How suitable are they to use with your students?
Create a quiz to test your readers knowledge. Quizzes can be a lot of fun. For those really wanting to extend themselves — try MyStudiyo, add some videos and get readers to answer questions based on what they can remember from the video
Create a poll to gather your readers opinion. Polls appeal to readers who like to express their opinion but don’t always like to leave comments.
Create a Slide tour of your class room or where you live to. Great for helping readers identify with who you are.
And remember to leave a comment with a link to your post so we can drop past to check it out! We like to include these links to your posts in our weekly reviews!
Check through their lists of cool tools, write a post about what you learn and WOW us with the ideas of how you could use some of these tools with your students!
And remember to leave a comment with a link to your post so we can drop past to check it out!
