Teach with Tech
I began this Teach with Tech blog to help me organize my thoughts for building a blog for elementary classroom use. I wanted to share what I have discovered through the past 5 months as well as continue learning by doing. The blog would also allow people to refer back to and explore important points at their leisure and convenience, making it a comfortable learning experience.
The first order of business is to choose a theme. You want to choose a theme that allows comments because communication with your audience is essential. Paisie has done the research and it is posted in the Edublogs forum. Thanks Paisie! Sue Waters has written a great post on what to consider when choosing your blog theme on her blog The Edublogger. Sue is an invaluable resource when it comes to blogging. Check out her other blog, too: http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/.
Once you choose your theme, it’s time to make it your own. If you chose a theme with a customizable header, then choose a photograph to upload. Click on the Design tab, then Custom Image Header tab.
Browse to find your custom photo, then upload. You will be given the chance to frame where you want your photo to be cropped. You are now ready to visit your blog site.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:40 am
Thanks for telling your readers about my blogs. Hope they find the information useful.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Thanks for stopping by, Sue. I am going to be doing some training in our school to get people started on building class blogs. I love the new idea of the free online training sessions. I hope we can see some of that archived. Our blog class will probably be 3 hours in the fall of ‘09 and 3 hours in the spring of ‘10.
You can see why I’m starting to put down my thoughts now in this blog – I hope it will serve as a resource that people in my school can look back into in between the training, or during the summer to help prepare themselves.
March 22nd, 2009 at 3:46 am
Always happy to drop past. Definitely will be archiving the sessions – provided I remember to press the old record button
and also have the ability to convert the sessions into video format.
Good idea about pulling together the ideas. I probably should warn you that Edublogs will be upgrading to version 2.7 eventually – there are some differences between the versions. My approach will be to change over my screenshots once the upgrade happens. We will also be providing manuals for the new version on our help site when the changeover happens.
March 22nd, 2009 at 1:20 pm
A new version! What do I need to be doing? How will that affect our blogs? I have about 100 more questions, so I guess my main question should be when will you start writing about this to prepare us!
I don’t want to get too far into this process with this teaching blog and my clinical faculty (for mentors working with pre-service teachers) blog without knowing the consequences. Thanks for the heads-up.
Manuals will be nice, too – although I must say that the support with the forums and through Edublogger were enough to get me going!
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:02 pm
The upgrade won’t happen until all the bugs with WordPress 2.7 have been ironed out and they have released 2.7.1. So at this stage it is impossible to predict when it will happen but will be several months away. We are aware that it will be a change for all our users so will be preparing all support material in advance so that the change over is less stressful.
You are fine to continue writing your information – just do the same as myself and replace the screenshots with newer ones when the changeover happens.
Those of your staff that are used to using blogs will quickly adapt to the new version.