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Showing posts with label BTBGuide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BTBGuide. Show all posts

March 8, 2020

BTBGuide: Announcements and Assignments

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There are all kinds of ways you can build on the Daily Announcements for student learning. I'll give two examples here of ways that my students can choose to use the Daily Announcements blog posts as learning assignments:

Weekly Review. In addition to a reflection blog post, I encourage students to do a weekly review. This includes checking to make sure they recorded all their work in Canvas, backing up their blog and website, and also taking a look through the current week's Announcements posts to see what items jump out at them. They then write a blog post where they share a favorite graphic from the week and also a favorite video that they watched. This is a good way for them to explore their interests and (re)connect with the Announcements, especially if they don't read the Announcements every day... and it is also a great way for me to learn what Announcements content is of interest to students.

Wikipedia Trail. This is one of my favorite assignments! To make their Trail, students pick something to start with out of curiosity or interest, and often it is something they see in the Announcements blog, especially in the Twitter stream. They then look it up in Wikipedia, write a few notes, and then go from that Wikipedia article to another to another to another to see where they end up. Here's one by a student who saw an item about Krishna in the Announcements, and following it up with a Wikipedia Trail that led her to the mystical Meera, a very important person in the bhakti tradition:


When the Announcements are full of all kinds of materials covering a range of interests, that gives students an opportunity to connect with something that they click with as individuals, something of interest to them which they then choose to learn about, purely out of their own curiosity.

That is a good way for them to learn... and it is also a great way for me to learn more about them and their interests, allowing me to do a better job with Announcements and content in the future. And so on. Learning and teaching, teaching and learing.



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BTBGuide: Dynamic Content: Slideshows

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I don't use slideshows to share content with students, but I have found one really excellent use of Google Slides for my purposes: I create a slideshow each semester of the student projects in each of my classes, and then I combine the slides in both shows for a presentation of all the projects across both classes.

I also got a randomizer add-on so that I can randomize the order of the slides (I try to do that daily if I remember) so that they're in a different order, with everybody having an equally random chance of coming early in the show.

I then embed this slideshow in various places: it's part of our class projects pages, for example, and I embed the shows in Canvas, and it's also in the sidebar of the Daily Announcements blog! Here you can see how it looks in Canvas:


I like the way this includes every project in a small space, and the slideshow is forever playing in the sidebar of the Announcements blog; there is literally something new to see every few seconds, and you never know when something will catch a student's attention and make them curious to explore one of their classmate's projects.


To embed a Google Slide show in the blog, just go to File-Publish, choose the Embed tab in the dialogue box, and choose your settings. For publishing here, I set the width to 400 and Google automatically adjusts the height.


Then I just paste in the code in the HTML view of the blog, and there it is: magic! As you can see, in addition to the screenshot for each project, there's a link to the project itself, along with the comment wall where students are leaving comments for the project author. Click on a link and see for yourself! :-)


This type of slideshow is also a great example of distributed content: when I update the order of the slideshow, the latest version is what will load and appear here, along with everywhere else I have embedded the slideshow.



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BTBGuide: Dynamic Content: Video Playlists

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Embedding videos in blog posts and in the sidebar is fun and easy... but it's even better to embed videos in a playlist! That way you can contextualize the videos so that users can choose what to watch, plus they can keep on watching and learn more. You can embed playlists created by others, or you can create your own YouTube playlists to embed.

Creating your own playlists is a great example of distributed content too: when you update the playlist at YouTube by adding a new video, that new video shows up in the playlist everywhere it is embedded. Automatically!

Here's an example from the great folks at Crash Course (my students love these videos!). If you go to the Crash Course Playlist page, you can find out if they have a course playlist you can use.


For me, it's World Mythology! So I click on the full view of the play list, and then I can click on the arrow icon to get the embed code:



Here's the code! The trick is to learn how to change the height and width to fit your blog best. I know that for my blog posts, a video at width 400 and height 225 is good. For my sidebar, a width of 200 and height of 112 is the way to go. And believe it or not, having playlists in the sidebar can be great, especially if you want students mainly to listen and take notes as they listen, for example.

To embed, just switch your post editing mode to HTML, paste in the code, and then adjust the height and width if needed.

Here's the Crash Course playlist embedded in this post; you can navigate on through the videos to choose what you want to watch. There are so many great videos in here (over 40 of them so far, and if Crash Course does add more, the playlist will have the new items too).


The playlist navigation is the little hamburger menu with the arrow in the upper-right corner of the video display:



MAKE YOUR OWN PLAYLISTS! YouTube makes it very easy to do that! To create your own YouTube playlists, here's a tip I wrote about that for my students: YouTube / Blogger tips: Create a Playlist. So, if you want just some of the Crash Course World Myth videos and not others, or if you want them in a different order, just create your own playlist.

And for your listening pleasure, here is a playlist of my favorite Indian musical group, Maati Baani! I just added a couple of their latest videos to the playlist. Welcome to the pure delight that is Nirali and Kartik, a.k.a. Maati Baani:


Same thing works in a Canvas Page: just use the "media" button (second from right on lower editing bar row), and paste in the code from YouTube; you probably don't need to adjust width if you are putting them into a Canvas Page.

So, I go to my Maati Baani playlist (this is one I made; anyone can use it). I click on the arrow to access the embed code:


I copy that code, and then I go to a Canavs Page. I click on the insert media button (lower editing bar, second from left), choose the Embed dialogue pane, and paste in the code. 


Presto! Playlist in my Canvas Page. (That's an open Canvas course, so click and go; you can see how the playlist works right there in the Page.)





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BTBGuide: Configuring a Blog Sidebar

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These notes are for Blogger, but you can do the same things... and way more things... with WordPress. For specific details, I've written up some step-by-step tips for my students which you can use here: Blogger Tech Tips.

This is just a quick behind-the-scenes sidebar guide to the items included here: The Joys of the Sidebar.

Theme. This is one of the left menu options from your Blogger blog dashboard. Before you start adding content to the sidebar in Blogger, first make sure you are using one of the theme templates that is sidebar-friendly. Some of the new mobile-first themes do not display the sidebar by default. Some sidebar-friendly themes are Simple, Picture Window, Awesome, Watermark, Ethereal, and Travel. after you choose a theme, you can customize it by selecting the background art, color scheme, adjusting column widths, etc.

Layout. To add content to the sidebar, choose the Layout option from the left menu. You will then add, remove and rearrange (drag and drop) content boxes in the sidebar column:


For some unknown reason, Blogger calls these things "gadgets" but I call them widgets since that is the more usual design term for these things. When you click on "Add a Gadget" at the top, you will see lots of possible options. Here are some of the ones I find most useful:

HTML/JavaScript. This gives you a box where you can copy-and-paste in HTML and javascript. This is what I use to add my javascript randomizers to the sidebar, and it is also what you use for embedding YouTube videos and playlists, embedding Google Slides, embedding Twitter widgets... basically, it is for embedding all the things!


Blog Search. Especially if you have suppressed the top navigation bar in order to make your blog fit more nicely inside the LMS, adding a search box to the sidebar is a good idea.


Labels. Labels are a blogging superpower. You can put multiple labels on blog post and access them again later by means of those labels. It is a way for both you and your readers to navigate your blog content without having to build the navigation as you do at a website. Labels generate the navigation options automatically! I often have multiple Labels widgets in my sidebar for blogs with complex varieties of content.


Link List. This widget is a little clunky to use, but it is a handy way to keep a list of links, even a long list of links, in the sidebar.


Follow by Email. This automatically set up a Feedburner email subscription service for your blog. Users can add themselves to the email list and remove themselves from the list; you don't have to do anything. The formatting of the blog emails is also really nice, preserving media, etc.


Featured Post. This can be useful if you have a post of special interest that you want people to be able to access from anywhere in your blog. For example, at this blog, I have made the "Be There with Blogging: Table of Contents" the featured post, so it is accessible from anywhere in the blog. The widget also snags the image from the blog post to include in the sidebar, which looks nice.






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BTBGuide: Dynamic Content: Twitter.

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One of the main themes I want to explore is the combination of blogging with dynamic content. Yes, you can write blog posts, and it's great to write blog posts. But you can also use the power of the Internet to bring content to your blog without having to write everything yourself. That's what dynamic content is about: fresh content that you deliver to your students using different kinds of content tools. And one of the best tools out there is... Twitter.

The reason Twitter is such a great content tool for teachers is that you can curate content from a huge range of sources and share what is valuable with your students in a dedicated class Twitter stream. Your students don't need to use Twitter; they don't need a Twitter account. Instead, you are the one using Twitter, collecting and sharing materials there for your students.

To see how that can work, here's my class Twitter account: @OnlineMythIndia (different from my personal Twitter account @OnlineCrsLady). I have a collection of Twitter lists that I use to quickly and easily find new content to add to that Twitter stream every day: content from online museums and magazines, cartoonists, authors in India whom we read in my India class, the amazing folks at #FolkloreThursday, and on and on. There's no shortage of content!

Then, I can embed that Twitter widget in the sidebar of my Daily Announcements blog; take a look and you will find it there down towards the bottom of the sidebar.  It even shows up in Canvas! (There are other ways to make Twitter work in Canvas which I've documented here, Twitter4Canvas, but having your Twitter stream in your blog is really the easiest way!)


I can also embed the live stream in a post, as I've done down below here.

How to embed Twitter in a blog sidebar or in a post? Just go to this address:
Publish.Twitter.com.

Paste in the Twitter stream you want to embed. It does not have to be your stream; it can be any Twitter stream (so if your school has a Twitter account, you can embed that in your blog, for example).


Then, customize as desired, update, and copy the code.



Just paste the resulting code into your sidebar widget box or into your blog post, as I'm doing here. Presto: live Twitter in your blog!



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BTBGuide: Dynamic Content: Javascript Randomizers

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In the Joys of the Sidebar post, I mentioned a lot of different kinds of randomizers: text randomizers for student-to-student advice, image randomizers for the Mindset Cats (and more), and video randomizers (which is actually a meta-randomizer: randomizing several different video randomizers). Those randomizers are what I call dynamic content because the content changes each time the page reloads.

I build these randomizing javascripts myself using a free online tool, Rotate Content. This tool was built by a former student, Randy Hoyt! (He's now a board game developer; check out his work at Foxtrot Games.) I just put the content-to-be-randomized into an HTML table, row by row, and the Rotate Content tool converts the HTML file into a javascript.

Here are the three main advantages I see with random content:

Random keeps site content fresh. If you have pages that students visit repeatedly (like our blog homepage in Canvas!), a randomizing script can make sure there is something new each time the page loads. You never know what will prompt someone's curiosity!

Random is a way to surface large amounts of content. There's nothing like a long list of links to stifle the browsing experience, especially for the links way on down the list. Randomizing widgets are a way to surface content more effectively than a long list of static links. I've got hundreds of past student projects to share, for example, and hundreds of pieces of student-to-student advice. The randomizer is the best way to get all that content on display.

Random adds an element of fun and mystery. It's like a game, or something even more ancient and profound: divination. Many cultures have used randomness for divination, like the sortes Virgilianae. That Latin word sortes is the origin of our word "sorcery" — yes, it's magic! Find out more about divination with books: Bibliomancy.

In that spirit, here's a Tarot card randomizer, a larger version of the same widget running in the sidebar here. More about this Tarot script (and the gorgeous artwork by Pamela Colman-Smith): Tarot Card Javascript. I've chosen the version here which includes the cards upside-down as well as right-side-up:


To learn more about these randomizing javascripts, here's a blog I created for a CanInnovate presentation which I made in 2019: Javascript Magic in Canvas. Randomizing Widgets, No Coding Required.

Slides. Here's a link to the Slides file and also a link to the full-screen view.


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March 7, 2020

BTBGuide: Javascripts and the Power of Distributed Content

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A lot of the dynamic sidebar content I listed in this post, The Joys of the Sidebar, was powered by javascripts: the random cats, books, student advice, videos, projects, 100-words stories — these are all javascripts that display content at random. So, that's dynamic content: each time the page loads, the content is different. (More about how I create those randomizers here: Dynamic Content: Javascript Randomizers.)

In addition to being dynamic content, those javascripts are also distributed content. There is one javascript, and it displays content wherever the javascript is called: in blogs, webpages, wikis, wherever javascripts are allowed. One script, distributed... wherever!

To see what I mean, here's a link to one of those javascript randomizers. This is the 400-pixel wide version of the Mindset Cat. It's a .js (javascript) file in my own webspace as you can see here:https://widgets.lauragibbs.net/gmcats/growth400.js

It's basically a little computer program! (No, I did not write the program myself; I use the free Rotate Content tool to do that for me.) To make the javascript program run, you have to wrap it up in a script call, so this is the actual HTML code you copy-and-paste to make the random cats display:



And here's the script at work; just reload to see more cats at random.

To learn more about these randomizing javascripts, here's a blog I created for a CanInnovate presentation which I made in 2019: Javascript Magic in Canvas. Randomizing Widgets, No Coding Required.

Slides. Here's a link to the Slides file and also a link to the full-screen view.


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BTBGuide: Blogs as Distributed Content

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One of the biggest advantages to embedding a blog in the LMS is that it functions as distributed content. You update the blog, and then those updates appear live everywhere that the blog is embedded. One of the biggest problems with LMSes is the lack of support for distributed and syndicated content (that's a rant I'll save for another post); blogs are one way to overcome that problem.

So, for example, when you create a new blog post, it appears automatically where you embedded the blog in your LMS space. I update my blog every day, but I don't open Canvas every day; I don't need to open Canvas. The current version of the blog appears automatically.

Multiply that effect! I use the same Announcements blog for all three of my class sections; I update the blog once, and it appears automatically in all three Canvas spaces. If you can't use exactly the same Announcements blog for all of your classes, then think about creating an "Exploration" blog that you can use for all three classes, with separate "Announcements" blogs that are class-specific.

Share your blog. Another great way you could use distributed blog content is to have a blog that would be useful across many classes: a group blog that members of an academic department create together (you can add multiple authors to a Blogger blog), or a blog from the your school library that would be of interest to students in many classes, or a student success blog from your tutoring center. Using the Redirect Tool, teachers at your school could easily add the blog to their Canvas spaces!

Another way to distribute content (edit in one place, updates appear everywhere) is with javascript widgets; I'll have more to say about that in some future posts.

Blogs:
a way to SHARE online with others.


Learn and then share what you learned.


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BTBGuide: Getting Started with Blogger

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To get started with Blogger, I will just refer you to the instructions I share with my students here: Creating a Blog and Writing Your First Post. (If you're curious about the overall flow, here's what the students do next after they have their blog up and running: Orientation Week.)


I've also got some Blogger Tech Tips. Those are extra credit items; some students in the class are really into developing their blog as a space, while other students just go with the default template. Either way is fine with me; the blog is just a means for them to connect with each other and share their writing online. (These are Gen. Ed. Humanities courses without any special technology emphasis or requirement.)


As teachers, you might have other questions about starting your blog that are not addressed there in the instructions; if that's the case, let me know via this Questions Form so that I can address those concerns here!

Multiple blogs. Blogger allows you to create 100 separate blogs, and there are no limits on the number of posts in a blog. (I have blogs with literally thousands of posts.) So, I would suggest that you actually make two blogs: one blog that will become your Class Announcements blog to share with your students, plus a personal blog that you can use as an online notebook and also as a kind of sandbox to test out different blog features that you think you might want to use in your Class Announcements blog.

Make it a habit. The best way to learn about blogging is to blog, and to blog every day. Let it become your learning diary! Did you learn something new today? Of course you did — we all learn new things every day, and a blog is a great place to keep a record of that, day by day.






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BTBGuide: The Joys of the Sidebar

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As I mentioned earlier in Advantages of Blogging, one of my favorite features of blogging is the sidebar. That makes me kind of old-school, I know; the advent of mobile-first blog design means the sidebar is not a prominent blog feature the way that it was back in the day. But at the same time, I am a huge fan of what the sidebar can add to the blog experience, and that's the topic for this post.

Over time, the contents of my Announcements sidebar have changed, and that's one of the fun things I do at the start of each semester, deciding what content to include. Below is an inventory of what I have in the sidebar for Spring 2020, and in separate posts I'll get into some of the technical details about the different kinds of sidebar content. Meanwhile... pop open the blog so you can see for yourself: Daily Announcements. Details below.

Random Mindset Cats. The mindset cats have been part of my course for years now. They are a big hit with students, which is why they're at the top of the sidebar. There are hundreds of cats in the randomizer, which means lots of different content popping up each time. Each cat links to a post in the separate Mindset blog.


Random Advice. This is something new! Last semester I gathered up heaps of student-to-student advice which students provide at the end of the semester to the students coming in the next semester. I used a kind of "post-it" style color scheme to pop up random student-to-student advice here, plus a link to the course calendar.


Recent Announcements. This is an RSS feed for announcements over the past five days so students can easily browse back through day by day if they want.


Subscribe by Email. Quite a few students subscribe to the announcements by email, and some of them stay subscribed after the semester is over, continuing to browse the announcements for fun after the class is over.


Spring Projects. As soon as the class projects I go, I create a Google Slideshow which plays automatically; all 90 students projects are in there now. I use a randomizer to change the order (I try to remember to do that every day, but at a minimum I re-randomize every week). Yes, it's tiny, but you can click and go to the project from here!


Random Storybook. This is a randomizer of student projects from past semesters. As with the slideshow, each one links to the actual project online.


Random Free Book. These are books from the Freebookapalooza blog; each image has a link to a post at that blog with a table of contents and more information about the book.


Random Videos. This is a randomizer with YouTube videos relevant to my classes; yes, it's tiny, but the video will play right there in the sidebar! There's also a link to see the video (and it will display as part of a playlist).


Random 100-Word Stories. This is something new! I've been trying out some new microfiction experiments in class (and the students are definitely into it!), so this widget displays a 100-word story, along with a link to a blog post where students can find out more about the story.


Twitter. This is my class Twitter, @OnlineMythIndia, which is separate from my personal Twitter @OnlineCrsLady. For the class Twitter, I retweet items relevant to the class content along with campus news.


Search This Blog. I added this search widget when a student made that suggestion in Suggestion Box. I had no idea students would want to search the blog, but at least one of them did. So now there is a search box. :-)


Suggestion Box. This is just a static widget with an image and a link to a Google Form where students can leave anonymous suggestions about the class. I don't get a lot of suggestions that way, but I do get some, and I also think it sends a good message just to have the Suggestion Box available. (I embed that same Suggestion Box form inside the Canvas course spaces also.)


So, that's what I have going on this semester. And next semester, who knows? It will mostly stay the same, but I will probably retire some features in order to make room for some new ones!

And there's one crucial thing to remember.........

Sidebar is extra. I always have to remind myself that the side is just something extra: something fun, stimulating, and useful too, but it is an extra that not all the students will see.

For example, students will also not see the sidebar content if they subscribe the blog via email or if they read the blog via an RSS reader.

In addition, Blogger automatically suppresses the sidebar in mobile view. You can see what mobile view looks like by adding ?m=1 to any blog address. For example, here is my blog homepage shown in mobile view:
http://ouclassannouncements.blogspot.com/?m=1
And here's what a post looks like:
http://ouclassannouncements.blogspot.com/2020/03/saturday-march-7.html?m=1
(Just add ?m=1 to any Blogger URL to simulate the mobile view.)

So, while most of my students are doing work for my classes using a laptop, I always make sure that they can get the essential information they need from the actual posts in the Announcements blog. The sidebar is there as a supplement, but it's definitely an extra; the essential content of the blog is always in the blog posts themselves.

Mobile view:




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Embedding a Blog in the LMS

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This is something I had written up back in March in order to help people who were suddenly moving online at that time; I've now edited the post so that it fits in the flow of the Summer2020 series. :-)

This post explains how to embed a blog in Canvas, and the same should be possible in the other major LMSes. I used to do this when my school had D2L years ago, and I'm sure it would work in Blackboard also.

To see how it works, take a look at one of my courses: I use my Class Announcements blog as the homepage for the class: Myth.MythFolklore.net (the class is open; just click and you'll be there).


I actually embed the blog twice, using the two different methods that I'll describe below. I embed the blog using Canvas's Redirect Tool so that there is a better blog display, but I also embed the blog using iframe inside a Canvas Page, which allows me to make the blog the actual Homepage for the course.

Below you will find information about both of those methods of embedding in Canvas, along with some information about how to configure your blog so that it is LMS-friendly.


CANVAS REDIRECT TOOL

 One option for embedding a blog in Canvas is to use the Redirect Tool. Here's how that works in the Mythology class space:
https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/149665/external_tools/10767

From that URL, you can see that I am using a "tool" (specifically, the Redirect Tool) which I have configured to display the blog in that space.


It looks pretty good, especially if you close the left menu bar. All you see there is the page; the Redirect Tool takes a webpage and plops it inside Canvas.

Redirect Tool step by step. Just go to Settings, Apps, search for Redirect Tool, Add App, and then for "Name" type in the name you want to have appear in the navigation, paste in the blog address (or the address of a specific post in a blog), UNCLICK the force open option, CLICK the show in course navigation option, and then click Add App to close the dialogue box.

You will now see the item in the course navigation menu, and you can turn it on or off from there like any other item in the navigation menu. I call mine "Daily News" so that it fits nicely in the menu bar space.


CANVAS PAGES (IFRAME)

 Since the Redirect Tool is so easy, why would you want to embed a blog in a Canvas Page? Two reasons: (1) you can type some text up at the top of the blog display to provide context, instructions, etc. and (2) if you want to use the blog as your homepage, it has to be a Canvas Page. For some reason that exceeds the knowledge of mere mortals, Canvas will not let you use a Redirect Tool URL as your Homepage.

Here's what that same blog looks like embedded in a Canvas Page; from the URL you can see how this is just a Canvas Page address:
https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/149665/pages/daily-announcements


The disadvantage is obvious: the right-hand menu takes up so much real estate and, for my purposes, it is useless (I don't use the LMS except as a space where students record their grades). So you'll see that above the blog I have a link that takes the students out of the LMS space (escape! escape!), and there's also a link that suppresses the right-hand menu, i.e. it is a link to the Redirect Tool item I described above.

Page Embedding step by step. To embed a blog in a Canvas Page, you create a Page, type whatever content you want to appear at the top of the blog, and then you embed an iframe. Then, position your cursor below where you've typed, and click on the embed media icon (second from right on bottom row of editing bar). Then, you will paste code like this into the box:

<iframe src="URL" width="100%" height="1000"></iframe>

The URL is the web address, and you can adjust the height as needed; my blog always requires scrolling anyway, so I just have the height be 1000 pixels (wrestling with the height parameter is the single biggest drawback to iframe for page design; it's basically a pain in the butt for dynamic content without a fixed height).

Once you have a Page with your blog embedded, you can then designate that as your course "front page" in Canvas.


LMS-FRIENDLY BLOG CONFIGURATION

If you are going to be embedding your blog in Canvas, there are a couple of things you can do to optimize the blog display so that it will work well.

The technical details below are based on Blogger, but you can make the same kinds of adjustments to a WordPress or other blog.

Open all links in new tab. One of the worst things about an LMS is the way that it opens links inside an iframe or other LMS-delimited space. (I'll save all the reasons why that is a problem for another blog post.) Long story short, to be sure your blog functions properly when embedded in an LMS, you should configure the blog to open all links in a new tab.

In Blogger, the way to do that is to edit your blog template file. To do that, go to Theme-EditHTML and add this little snippet of code — <base target='_blank'/> — right after the <head> tag. It will look like this:


Then click Save Theme.

Yes, that is scary-looking, for which I apologize. Blame Canvas for not giving you an option like that in your course settings (since there are many reasons why students should not open links inside the LMS... but like I said, long story for another post).

Suppress the top navigation bar. Some Blogger templates (what you might call Original Series and Next Generation templates, before the latest family of Mobile-First templates) have a navigation bar across the top. It's useful, but if you are going to be embedding your blog in Canvas, you'll probably want to suppress that navigation bar just to buy some extra real estate (given that Canvas gobbles up most of the real estate on the page, leaving you very little).

Here's how to suppress that navigation bar: go to Layout, then click Edit in the navigation bar box, and choose Off from the available options; then Save.


Blog width and other design features. You'll want to keep the blog on the narrow side if you are embedding in Canvas. In Blogger, you can adjust blog and sidebar widths in the Template - Customize area. Here are the settings I use at my Announcements blog: 840 pixels overall, and 260 pixels for the sidebar.


Again, you can do all these same things with WordPress (and more); I'm providing documentation for Blogger because that is still the best free/ad-free blogging option (more about why I use Blogger).


The tips on this page are not specific for blogs; they will work for any webpage (website) you want to embed. There are some websites that block this type of embedding, but by and large, the iframe method (which is what the Redirect Tool also relies on behind the scenes) is a powerful way to embed all kinds of web content, include webpages. For more about the power of the Redirect Tool in Canvas in particular, see this great post from Keegan Long-Wheeler: How To Integrate Websites Into Canvas.


And now, I'll add one more blog management "pro" tip: Blogs and Diigo. If you are thinking of using your blog to do content development, then you might want to give Diigo a try as a way to manage all those blog posts. It works great for me!



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BTBGuide: Choosing a Platform (and Why I Use Blogger)

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There are a lot of different blogging platforms out there. There are traditional platforms like Google Blogger and WordPress, along with variations like Medium or Tumblr, and some people still refer to platforms like Twitter as microblogging.

Among educators, WordPress is a very popular choice, especially with support from the Edublogs project.

Every platform has its own advantages and disadvantages, and in this post I'll explain why Blogger is the platform that I use. Some of these reasons may apply to your situation, some may not.

1. I'm a Blogger veteran. I was using Blogger back when it was Pyra Labs, before it was acquired by Google in 2003. I've grown with Blogger over all that time, and my expectations for what blogging can be have taken shape within the Blogger space. It's comfortable, and it's familiar... it's very familiar. That means I can work really efficiently in Blogger, and I can also provide excellent technical support to my students who choose to use Blogger for their blogs.

2. Blogger is simple. Blogger is not just simple; Blogger is very simple. It offers only a tiny (TINY) fraction of the options of WordPress. For me, that's a good thing. My goal is to build content, and lots of it. With Blogger, I just sit down and get to work, spending basically no time at all on blog design and configuration.

3. Blogger is easy for beginners. Because Blogger is simple, it is also easy for beginners. All my students create blogs, and they choose their blogging platform. If they are new to blogging, I recommend Blogger; here are the instructions they use to get started. Presto! Anyone can get up and running with Blogger in literally a few minutes.

4. Blogger is ad-free. Blogger is, and always has been, ad-free, while WordPress.com blogs have advertising. My school now offers a "Domain of One's Own" option from Reclaim Hosting so students, faculty, and staff can host their own WordPress blog ad-free in their own space; that's been a wonderful new development because it means amy of my students who do want to create WordPress blogs can do so in their own space. (Yay DoOO and Reclaim Hosting!)

5. Blogger is javascript-friendly. This is similar to the advertising situation: free WordPress.com blogs do not allow javascripts (I'm not sure how Edublogs handles javascripts; they may restrict them also). Blogger, on the other hand, is, and always has been, javascript-friendly. The randomizers I use in the sidebars of my blogs are javascripts, and I sometimes include javascripts in my blog posts too, so Blogger is a good option for me (I love javascript randomizers!).

Those are the main reasons that come to mind, but I will update this post if I think of any others. Meanwhile, the other posts in this series will be applicable to any blogging platform, even though I will be using examples from my own Blogger blogs.

And yes, someday Blogger will come to an end, but that's another nice thing about blogging:  you can export blogs in XML format to back up your content, and also to migrate your content to another platform. I'll have more to say about back-ups and other blog maintenance in a later post. :-)


Blogger back in the day: who else remembers this look?

Google acquires Pyra



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BTBGuide: Advantages of Blogging: Daily Announcements

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Blogging has been the center of my work teaching online: I blog, and my students all blog too! In this Guide, I am going to focus on the idea of a blog channel for class communication, a "Daily Announcements" type of blog that teachers can use to be there for their students. To get a sense of how that works, take a look; this is my Daily Class Announcements blog.

Every day, there is a new blog post. A new post every day conveys the sense of always being there, day by day. No matter what day students are doing work for the class, there's something new that day at the announcements. The information is current, and the content is also fresh and fun.

Easy to manage. I queue up tomorrow's post in advance; the new post goes live at midnight (while I'm happily snoozing). If I'm going to be out of town, I queue up all the announcements before I leave town. Plus, while each post is long, I'm writing very little new content; almost all of the content is recycled from semester to semester, and that's fine: that old content is new to this semester's students!

Different content for different purposes. At the top of each day's post, I identify where we are at in the semester with a link to current assignments. Below that I have two (or maybe three) pertinent notes about class procedures and reminders, and then below that is a big body of content to explore. I include items there from the class blog stream and from Twitter, past student projects, videos, graphics, plus a featured campus event of the day and an "on this day" holiday or anniversary. The idea is to keep the students informed (stuff in the top part of the post), but also to stimulate their curiosity and support their learning in a more general sense (stuff in the lower part of the post).

Dynamic sidebar content. In addition to the fresh daily content, there is even more fresh content in the sidebar. The blog sidebar is one of my favorite thing about blogging (and yes, I use the more old-fashioned templates where the sidebar is always visible). I put dynamic content in the sidebar so that in addition to the new content every day in the post, there is new content each time the page reloads: random mindset cats, random student advice, random books, all kinds of randomness going on. So, if a student sees the announcements more than once in a given day, there is still a sense of newness each time that happens.

Personal presence. Above and beyond the syllabus, the assignments, etc., this is a place where I can connect with the students, being there for them as a teacher, and also as a learner. As I learn new things online (which I do every day!), I can share what I am learning with my students too. The Announcements blog is a space where I show the students how I connect, learn, and share online, hoping that they will want to connect, learn, and share online too.

Learning: it's all about making connections. :-)



Picture your brain forming new connections.


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Be There with Blogging: A Guide for Teachers

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I'm writing this on March 7 2020, when a lot of people are thinking about the possibility of moving classes online. I've been teaching fully online courses since 2002 (not a typo), and I thought the best contribution I could make would be a guide for how to Be There with Blogging. This will be an evolving guide for beginners about how you can use the power of blogging to create a fun, friendly, helpful, and encouraging space online where you can be there for your students.

I believe that every class — any subject, any age level, on any online platform — can benefit by having a blog as one of the communication channels. Not a fake blog inside the LMS, but a real blog that you can configure in your own way, making it visible both inside and outside the LMS. For an example, here is the Daily Class Announcements blog I use with my classes, which is also the homepage in our LMS space also, as you can see here (this is a link to an open Canvas class, so you can click and look): Myth.MythFolklore.net.

So, this post is my first post for my Be There with Blogging guide. I'll be using Blogging as the label here (to identify just the blogging guide posts since I also publish other content here), and I'll use the hashtag #BTBGuide at Twitter. I've set up a Google Form for questions and suggestions which you will see embedded below (I'm covering topics pretty quickly, so you can let me know what I need to cover in more detail, for example), and I've also set up a short URL for this page: Blogging.LauraGibbs.net.

Here's a Table of Contents for the posts so far:
I have kept the focus here on a Daily Announcements blog from the teacher, but of course there is so much more: blogging is a great tool for all kinds of content development and things get even more exciting when the students start blogging too.

I'll stop here for now, though, on the assumption that teachers might benefit most from a Daily Announcements blog if they are faced with a sudden switch to online. I'll use this Guide as a jumping off point later to write up some more thoughts about being-there-with-blogging, and what it means to build connected courses online.

Happy Blogging, everybody!


(Pxhere)

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