We are here again, that lovely time of year when we get to say something nice about each other and help us get the recognition that money can’t buy (?).

Nominations for the 2011 Edublog Awards are open, and here are mine.

• Best individual blog: Steve Wheeler – Learning with ‘e’s.
• Best individual tweeter: There are so many to choose from, but I’m going for Steve Wheeler / @timbuckteeth
• Best ed tech/resource sharing blog: James Clay – e-Learning Stuff
• Best twitter hashtag: #edtech
• Best free web tool: Twitter
• Best educational use of podcast: @Documentally
• Lifetime achievement: Prof. Stephen Heppell

OK folks, let’s see what & who you like this year … click here for the Edublog 2011 nomination hashtag: #eddies11 and make you own nominations here: http://edublogawards.com/nominations/

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Whilst waiting for my iOS5 update to proceed I did quite a bit of reading, and one item that caught my eye was this post called “At Last – Recognition for Blog-based Portfolios” by Jim Shimabukuru, which reported on an academic paper written by a group of 6 US professors – “bPortfolios: Blogging for Reflective Practice“.

The abstract for the academic paper is:

“Web 2.0 technology, such as blogging, allows for locally developed, cost effective, and holistic alternative portfolio assessment systems. By enhancing critical reflection and fostering social interaction, blogging portfolios are seen as an integral learning tool for all students enrolled in a university program.”

Quite what the difference is, for the student’s final portfolio, between the blog and portfolio edition is still not clear yet, but it is obviously an alternative solution, and one that ought to be considered.

Many will know that I’ve long been a champion of electronic-based portfolio systems, and have tested and used a few of them (PebblePad, Mahara, etc). While the process of getting them used more widely than as part of a reflective writing element in a single Unit/Course is still on-going, I am now thinking that we have the basis here, with blog-based portfolios,

The highlights of using a blogging system (like WordPress) as the portfolio system are:

• WordPress.com hosted blogs are free.
• Students can use the portfolios across their entire study for numerous on-campus and online courses experiences.
• The portfolios promote and support ‘social interaction’, (i.e., ‘Students share their learning reflections in an open format’).
• Students can ‘continue to maintain their site upon completion of the program as their individual accounts are not registered on a university server’.
• The portfolio is ‘stored’ in the cloud (e.g. WordPress.com) if an Institutional system is not implemented.
• The portfolios are ‘highly cost effective’ and sustainable: “The university can focus its time and efforts on improving instruction and student support for the bPortfolio rather than allocate funds and personnel to web-hosting, software upgrades, and software support, etc. in the bPortfolio project”.

Jim closes his piece by saying that the use …

“… of WordPress and Blogger for teacher and student publications and portfolios is a highly sustainable, cost-effective, and educative practice. It expands the students’ e-learning environment beyond the walls of the college to include the worldwide web. Sloan-C, and especially SPU, are to be congratulated for taking this bold step toward re-empowering teachers for the 21^st century classroom.”

While his use of a blogging system was not sanctioned or supported officially (something he is glad of, in fear of opposition to his implementation) he recognises that there are implications regarding student support, both pedagogically and from the technical viewpoint. Both Blogger and WordPress have extensive resources online for just about every eventuality, this is not always the ‘cleanest’ method of support.

So, the big question … are ePortfolios on their way out before they’ve really gained traction, or is the subect of bPortfolios just going to dilute the discussion about the engagement of students, faculty, and employers? I welcome your comments.

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Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

What better way than to get (almost) immediate feedback on something than with a question or poll? This is yet another easy thing to do with WordPress and the ‘WP-Polls‘ plugin can handle everything you need, including:

• multiple polls
• side-bar widget for latest and closed polls
• choice of how your polls are dislpayed (default or CSS driven)
• logging of responses
• time-out / close polls after specificed time, or leave open

You can put the poll anywhere in a post, or have it all on it’s own, the choice is yours – all you need to do is click the image in the blog post tool bar and assign the poll ID, you can get this from the Admin panel (see image below).

Here are a few screenshots of the admin panel and how the polls are displayed (click to enlarge):

Admin Panel images:

Poll Admin Options

Add Poll and Poll answers

Active Poll and Poll Widget:

Active Poll (inc. results) in blog post

Active Poll (inc. results) in side-bar (Widget)

Related posts:

1. WordPress Plugin #13: WordBooker (WordPress and Facebook integration)
2. WordPress Plugin #18: Popular Posts
3. Poll: What blogging software do you use?

Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

Some blogs get more traffic than most, and I am confident when I say I get a fair amount of page views and visitors (yes, I check my Google Analytics about twice a month). When was the last time you looked at your OWN blog with a fresh pair of eyes, and thought about how you would find more about the author and/or subjects?

One way is the About page, where you ought to have some background information about you and why you are an authority on the subject you blog about (for me it’s eLearning, blogging, Social Media, etc, etc). Another great way to direct visitors to content is through a ‘Related Links‘ list of posts – which I wrote about last year.

Another way is to publish a list of ‘popular posts’ in the sidebar and, yes you guessed it, there’s a plugin for that.

Installation of the ‘WordPress Popular Posts‘ plugin is, as always, simple and quick to do. once installed and activated you head on over to the Widget section of the’Appearance’ admin panels and drag the widget into your sidebar.

The settings are fairly self-explanatory (click on the image below to enlarge and see the full widget option list) like what details to show on the post (number of comments, views, excerpt, etc), how many posts to show and over what date/time scale, and may more:

Click to enlarge

Unfortunately the stats and numbers only start once you’ve installed the plugin, as you can see from the screenshot below, the posts have only had a couple of views each, but that’s not too bad since I only installed it about 10 minutes ago:

Click to enlarge

Watch this plugin grow!

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As some of you may know I am working towards a post-graduate certificate qualification in Education Practice at Bournemouth University. I’ve spent most of my Christmas break (when the family and kids allowed) working on my first assignment for the ‘Introduction to Education Practice’ unit. I am basing this on my work in developing and delivering the Induction Programme for the fully-online International Business and Management under-graduate degree, and how it can be improved/updated to suit the possible changing student profile in the anticipated future economic climate.

While searching and researching the various methods of induction for students I cam across these videos and explanations on the IMU eLearning blog, a few I’ll show here, but please view the original post to view them all.

• What happens next?

Ask the students to watch the video below and be prepared to discuss a ‘what happens next’ situation. Play the video and pause it when the cat reaches the fishbowl, then ask your students to discuss what happens next. Most likely you will stimulate their minds to think creatively about what happens next in a competitive but enjoyable way. Did you guess what happened next … ?

• Awareness test

Tell the students you are looking for them to be observant, and to count how many passes of the ball the White team makes. Play the video below and pause it when the teams have stopped passing the ball between them. Ask for the answers … and then ask them if anyone saw the moonwalking bear? When they’ve stopped gasping or laughing continue the video.

• Language Skills

This is a good example of the importance of language skills, which can often be a sensitive subject for some students who have poor english – use this light-hearted example to break the barrier and raise a laugh or two.

Do you use any video clips in your induction? If so please share with us all and leave a comment.

PS. I used the Smart YouTube WordPress plugin to embed these YouTube videos, try it out on your own WordPress blog too, it’s so very easy!

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Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

If, like me, you use Twitter on a mobile device then you’ll be aware of Twitpic – you can share photos you take on the move quickly and easily as they are published with your tweet, as you tweet; “You can post photos to TwitPic from your phone, from the site, or through email.”

Great, but now what? The only time you or anyone else can see those wonderful sunsets or conference photos is when they find your old tweet from last year. But not any more – here are two great WordPress plugins that can bring your twitpics to your blog.

Firstly I want to introduce TwitPic for WordPress. This plugin enables a widget for your sidebar and displays your latest pictures. The plugin is widget ready and has many different options for configuration so install it, play with it, and see what is best for you and your blog.

This is how my sidebar looks, today, with TwitPic;

The second plugin I want you to hear about is called WP-Twitpic which allows you to insert an image from  TwitPic into your blog posts. Once the plugin in installed you insert any image from TwitPic into your post using the unique hash provided by TwitPic. You can then change its size, URL, alignment etc, as you can with any other image. Just activate the plugin and use [ twitpic id = hash ] (without the spaces!).

Here’s a photo from the FOTE2010 conference a month or so back using the code [ twitpic id = 2tlr0v ] (without the spaces);

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Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

I like to browse through blogs to see what the author has had to say in previous posts, and there are several ways of doing this;

• browse the contents on the home page – nice but a little too random.  Sometimes I am looking for something specific.
• browse the contents of a category – much clearer contents based on category the author posted to.
• browse the contents of a tag – this is my preferred method, you get a wider selection of relative and appropriate content.
• use the search tool – this is always a good one, but often the search box is hidden and it’s too much trouble to hunt for it.
• use the archive list - browse the archive, month by month.

The other way is to browse the blog y date, and this is where the ‘archive’ come in. This is often the last item in the side-bar and sometimes not even present at all – let’s face it, if you’ve been blogging for any amount of time this can be quite a long list of months to show.

So, after a short hunt through a popular search engine I came across this plugin, installed it, and haven’t looked back – the Collapsible Archive Widget loads a javascript list in the side-bar, where ever you choose to put it (even in the footer?) with  and  images to indicate more or less information to be shown.

Here it is working;

It’s good, but I admit that I don’t use them … so why have them? I have this purely for the search engines; while it’s a bit of a download (and getting longer with the more posts I make) it’s good for the search engines. I will eventually remove this feature on the blog but for now, it stays.

Do you use/browse through websites using the archive lists? Why (or why not)?

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Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

Much has been written recently about people having their work ripped off, word for word. It’s happened to me once or twice, and there is little bloggers can do about it. Dave Colman (@davecoleman146) had this happen as well, and wrote about it on his blog “SharePointEduTech“, and the comments were well made and sympathetic to his plight.

But what can you or I do about protecting our blog content, our intellectual property? I’ve already mentioned the copy-protect service called Tynt, in the post “What’s being copied from your blog?“.

Well, here’s another little thing you can add to your blog. It won’t stop it happening but it will give a visual identity to your awareness of the facts, and that you are covering yourself for any future action you want to take. The plugin is called “Creative Commons Configurator” and you go through a process of selecting the type of licence you want to use, and how you want it displayed.

You can add the text to the HTML meta tags too, all part of the plugin.

have you been the victim of someone copying your content (and they even use the links to your images too)? How did you deal with them and handle the situation?

No related posts.

Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

Can WordPress get any better, whether it’s for a simple blog of a full corporate platform for the website and much more … yup, it can!

Just announced is the new Blackbird Pie pluginfor WordPress, which will automatically display the tweet, it’s author, and appropriate links in your WordPress page or post. They say it …

“… is a method of displaying tweets as rich full content rather than as just simple URLs or images. With Blackbird Pie Twitter, hashtags link to search pages and usernames link to twitter profiles. An individual tweet, or pie, includes all the details, design, and information that a single tweet page would include. As a blogger, Blackbird Pie offers a great way to engage Twitter on your site and bring discussion to your blog.”

What do you need to do … other than install the plugin? Easy, just like the YouTube plugin to embed YouTube videos by simply pasting the URL, all you do it paste the URL of the tweet and the plugin does the rest (don’t forget to remove the link on the text!). Here it is in action (I thought I’d use one of my old tweets as an example);

Blogged: What is a Learning Technologist (part 2)? http://is.gd/gcwCs

October 22, 2010 10:32 am via WordTwit PluginReplyRetweetFavorite

@hopkinsdavid

David Hopkins

Great, isn’t it!

Since the upgrade I downloaded this morning (November 16th) there’s now a lovely little blackbird button that’s been added to the toolbar, and from here you can insert a tweet based on full URL, the ID of the tweet, or search for a username and select the tweet from the list;

The options are …

[View as Slideshow]

Which gives you the tweet like this;

This Robin Hood Airport thing is being blown up out of all proportion #twitterjoketrial

November 12, 2010 11:29 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@GeneHunt

Gene Hunt

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We’re here again (wow, was that a year already?) and below are my nominations for the Edublog Awards, 2010. I’ll not be making a nomination for every category, but I hope the names below are capable of being worthy winners.

Here goes:

Best individual blog - Jane’s eLearning Pick of the Day
Best individual tweeter – Steve Wheeler @timbuckteeth
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion – #edtech
Best educational podcast – @Documentally
Best use of a PLN – The Educator’s PLN http://edupln.ning.com
Lifetime achievement – Sir Ken Robinson

Good luck peoples, let’s see how we go.

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