Wednesday 19 May 2010

How to embed a video

Embed a video using Blogger



Embed a video using Wordpress

Sunday 9 May 2010

A blog is a blog

There are different providers of blogs and there are a couple of reasons for looking closer at them.

This blog, for example, is from blogger. It is one of the most common providers, is very simple, and belongs to google now.

It's simplicity means that it is quite self-explanitory; however, it also means that there are fewer things you can do with it. I personally like using it as a class blog because it is easy to help my learners sign in and write posts.
Unfortunately, there has been a slight change in the membership rights, making blogger more difficult to access for those in South America. More steps are necessary and you need to supply a mobile number to confirm who you are. We don't know why this change has been made, but it is a very recent one.

An alternative, which is especially useful if you have younger learners is edublog. It is also quite straight forward and offers support. You are also part of an educational network with edublogs.
However, if you want several people to be able to post, then you either need to share the same log-in, or you need to upgrade to 'pro'.

Wordpress is another option, but it is slightly more complex. You can do more with it, but it takes a bit more work to figure it out.

For the course we recommend you try to open blogger or, if oyu have problems with blogger, open edublogs. The joy of blogs is that you can have as many as you want. Play around and see which is best for your purposes.

Wednesday 5 May 2010

Writing comments

Writing comments is an important part of blogging. If you are reading other people's blogs, then let them know that you are there. First, it can become part of a conversation which can lead to enlightenment.

But especially if you have a public blog (a blog anyone can see as opposed to a closed blog) where students are writing, then comments can be extremely motivating and encourage writing.

It is a way of showing that you appreciate what the other person is writing.

The comments button on this blog is at the bottom of the post in small letters 'Comment'. If no one has added a comment, it will just state 'comment', but it will also let you know how many comments there are. You can even comment on a comment!

So now it's time for you to try this out. Leave a comment and finish this sentence:

Comments are ...

Feel free to be creative with the task or to comment on someone else's comment!!