Pages

Showing posts with label Summer2020. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Summer2020. Show all posts

August 11, 2020

Summer2020 Blogging Fest

Posted by
I retired from teaching after the Spring 2021 semester, but I'm still here, and glad to answer questions about blogging, RSS, etc. I'm at Twitter @OnlineCrsLady... and I have a new blog: Laura's Bookshelf.
Back in March, I published some notes about blogging in case people were interested in setting up a blog to use in conjunction with all-of-a-sudden teaching online; those notes are here: Be There with Blogging.

Now that the impossible semester is over, I will be taking some time to this summer to share some more detailed information about blogging, both as a strategy for fully online courses but also as a strategy for any course, including classroom-based courses. I've taught using student-blog-networks for years, and I can highly recommend it as a way for students to document and share their learning. When students have their own space in which to write and in which to interact with other students, it has a completely different feel to it than an LMS discussion board. In a blog, you can be yourself, creating your online presence week by week, post by post, a personal continuity that just does not happen in a discussion board which belongs to everybody/nobody. When a blog is yours and when you share that blog with others, it's fun and exciting in a way the LMS rarely is (at least in my experience).

So, to help people explore both blogging and student-blog-networks this summer, I've divided the Summer2020 Blogging Fest into two parts:

PART ONE is focused on getting started with your own blog and learning about how blogs work.

 PART TWO is focused on building a blog network, which is useful if you decide you want to start blogging with your students.

So, if you are new to blogging, start with Part One to see if you actually like blogging yourself. If you enjoy blogging, then you might be interested in moving on to Part Two, learning how to set up a network so that you and your students can blog together, sharing and also connecting in your individual blog spaces.

And if you are already a blogger, you can skip Part One and jump right into Part Two, learning how to connect individual blogs into a blog network using a free tool called Inoreader (no programming required!).

I have a few more posts to add about logistics of course design and student blogging, but all the technical posts about blogging and blog-networks are done.

So......... here we go:

Part One: BLOGGING

 In this part, I will be talking about blogging in general, and the specific how-tos I include will use Google's Blogger by way of example (although you will be able to apply the same techniques and strategies on other blogging platforms).

1. Starting a Blog: Your First Post
2. Blog URLs: Homepage and Posts
6. Links in Posts
7. Images in Posts
8. Embedded Media: YouTube Videos and Playlists
9. Embedded Media: Twitter, NPR, SoundCloud
10. Editing Existing Posts
12. Blog Themes and Layout
14. Blog Sidebar: Labels for Navigation
15. Blog Sidebar: RSS / Email / More
16. Blog Sidebar: HTML Boxes
17. Posts and Pages
18. Blog Backup/Export
19. Embedding a Blog in the LMS
20. Blogs and Diigo
Part Two: BLOG NETWORKING

 In this part, I will be talking about RSS in general, and specifically about how to use Inoreader both as an RSS feed aggregator, and also for running a student blog network. I'll also add some tips about student networking via comments.

1. What is RSS and what is Inoreader?
2. Subscribing to RSS with Inoreader
3. Inoreader Display Options
4. Blogger RSS for Comments and Labels
5. Inoreader Folders
6. Inoreader Tags
7. Inoreader Rules
8. Inoreader Export: HTML Clippings (Folders)
9. Inoreader Export: HTML Clippings (Tags)
10. Embedding HTML Clippings
11. More about Export: RSS
12. More about Export: OPML
13. Inoreader Bundles
14. Inoreader Star for Workflow
15. Inoreader Search
16. More about RSS: Diigo
17. More RSS: News, Podcasts, Padlet, etc.
18. Comments and Randomizers
19. Building a Culture of Feedback
20. Blogs and Completion-Based Grading


cat typing on laptop
Behold! I have a blog of my own.




Labels: ,

August 5, 2020

Latest Posts via Inoreader

Posted by

These are the latest blog posts! Just click on the title of a post to go to that post in its blog:

Labels: ,

July 9, 2020

Blogs and Completion-Based Grading

Posted by

And here we are: the final post in the series, where I'll say a few words about blogs and completion-based grading. I'm an advocate of ungrading in general (see book chapter here: Getting Rid of Grades), and I definitely do not want to be in the business of grading students blogs or their blog posts.

Here's what I do instead:

Each assignment in the class has a simple checklist for completion. When a student finishes an assignment, they log on at the LMS and take a true-false quiz for that assignment: they see the checklist again there, answer "true" (which is the "correct" quiz answer), and the points go in the Gradebook automatically. For more details, see this post: Gradebook Declarations.

Sometimes it's just super-short, like when students leave comments on each other's blogs:


Sometimes it's a longer list of items to check on for completion, like when students publish a story in their blog:


Here's how that looks in the LMS (and this system works for any LMS that has true-false quiz questions, which means any LMS):


Now, practically speaking, sometimes students do rush through a Declaration, treating it as a kind of "terms of service" agreement that you click on without reading. When that happens, like if I notice a story post that is way too short or way too long, or perhaps the image isn't working, etc., I just contact the student with a quick email letting them know they need to fix the post. It's not a big deal; I just refer them back to the checklist and ask them to let me know when the assignment is complete. I use tags at Inoreader to keep track of things like that; as I watch the posts go by, I add a tag called "pending" to a post that needs fixing up, and then I remove that tag when the student lets me know it's done.

I use this approach of Gradebook Declarations for all the work in my classes, putting the students fully in charge of that grading process. Even if that's not an approach you want to take, it can still be useful to think about what kind of blogging assignments lend themselves to this "checklist" style of assessment so that you can let the students take responsibility for that, while you can focus your time and attention on follow-up and feedback rather than record-keeping.

~ ~ ~

So......... that is the last of the posts, and I hope this has been useful. For me, all these different pieces: blogging, blog networking, and ungrading all fit together as part of an overall course design approach which is based on mutual trust and also mutual support. I hope you will find some useful ideas here, and I'm glad to brainstorm and talk about blog-based course design anytime!

Happy Blogging!!!



Descartes Cat says: I think, therefore I blog.
(made with cheezburger)

Labels: ,

Building a Culture of Feedback

Posted by

I've already dedicated a segment of this blog to feedback posts, so I want to link to that first of all: Feedback Resources.

What I'm going to do in this post is just link to each of those posts and then add a few comments here specifically about how blogs and blog networks come into play:

Feedback Bootcamp. Just as blogging is new to most students in class, feedback is also something new... and feedback is a lot more complicated than blogging! So, in the same way that I make sure to provide lots of specific support for students learning how to blog and how to feel confident about blogging, I do the same with feedback. Students start leaving the more social, informal comments on each other's blogs already in Week 2, but for the more substantive comments on each other's projects, there's a five-week exploratory process where students learn about giving and receiving feedback. They write blog posts with their thoughts as part of that process, and I learn so much from reading those posts, and that in turn helps me do a better job of providing students with feedback later on.

Feedback: My Diigo Bookmarks. I've mentioned before how much I like Diigo, and this "Diigo Library" of bookmarks is something that my students find very useful as they browse and explore class materials. Blogging is great, but when you have a large body of materials that you want students to explore, Diigo can be a really good way to do that. For more about Diigo, see the other posts in this series: Blogs and Diigo and RSS: Diigo.

Feedback Gallery. This project is a great example of how you can get students to help you figure out the best strategies to use for your classes. Just ask; they will tell you! So, for this project, I used a Google Form and asked them to share the best comments they had received from other students, and I then sorted those sample comments into a Google Doc to use with future students. Students had easy access to all the comments they had received because of the convenient way that all the comments they receive are accessible through their blog dashboard. For example, here's how the comments look in my class blog dashboard:


Student to Student Advice. This is a fun example of a randomizer that I use in the class announcements blog! I've written about randomizers like that here: HTML Sidebar Boxes - Randomizers. Each time the daily announcements blog comes up, you can see a bit of random advice there:


Ungrading: All-Feedback-No-Grades. Having a blog network where students document their work provides a solid foundation for ungrading. Students "declare" their work in the Gradebook (more about that in the next post), and each declaration leaves some kind of visible trail in the blogs. So, if students forget to do a declaration (and that does happen), it's not a problem at all; they just send me a note with a link to the post they forgot to declare and I can manually add it to the Gradebook. No fuss, no trouble.

And that makes a perfect transition into the next (and final) post, all about Blogs and Completion-Based Grading.


Labels:

Comments and Randomizers

Posted by

I've written up all the technical notes about blogging and blog networks, and in these last few posts, I'll share some comments about the logistics of how I run my classes, hoping that these ideas might be useful to others. All classes and contexts are different, though, which means each person has to find their own solutions. I'm glad to help brainstorm anytime about this kind of stuff; you can find me at Twitter: @OnlineCrsLady or send me an email at laurakgibbs@gmail.com.

Weekly commenting. Students actually have two commenting assignments each week: they comment on the story posts at each other's blogs, and they also use the blog space to leave each other comments about their project websites. The comments on the story posts are short and more social in nature, but the comments on the projects are more detailed since those comments are feedback for students to use as they work on project revisions. Taken together, these two commenting assignments account for one-third of the work that students do in the class each week, so it's definitely an important part of the class (the class is roughly one-third reading, one-third writing, and one-third commenting). Most students are really excited to see each other's work and interact in this way, and some students do additional commenting each week for extra credit (and there are also extra credit reading and extra credit writing assignments; the extra credit is a way for students to tilt the balance of the class in favor of the assignments they find most fun and/or useful). You can see what a typical week looks like here if you are curious: Week 10.

Commenting at blogs. The commenting feature of blogs is their weakest point, and I'll be the first to admit that. At the same time, I've stuck with the standard blog comment space as the student interaction space and that has worked well for me. Here are some advantages of using the blog commenting space for me:
* students keep their focus on the blog network as our "classroom" which in turn motivates them to do a good job with their individual blogs
* students get ideas for their own blogs from visiting the blogs of other students
* students have control over their blog comments: they can delete comments if needed (although spam or other unwelcome problems is not a problem; if it were a recurring problem, I would take a different approach)
* I can keep an eye on the blog commenting overall because there is an RSS stream for comments that I can view in Inoreader
* my students can comment on blogs of students in the other classes I teach (the classes I teach have a lot of overlap, and students are usually very curious to see what's going on in the other class)

How to support commenting the blog space. There are some things I do to make sure the blog commenting goes well, starting from the very beginning of class:
* I explain to students how to configure the blog commenting options right away when they set up their blogs
* I leave comments on students' blogs during the first week to make sure it's configured properly and also to model good commenting (most of my work in the first week of class is commenting on the new blogs)
* I have a troubleshooting page for the kinds of technical problems people sometimes run into with blog comments (usually browser-related problems)
* I'm a co-student in the class which means I have a blog too, and students are leaving comments on my blog too; I'm sharing that experience with them
* I promote a culture of feedback throughout the course; more about that in the next post

Commenting alternative: LMS. If I did decide to abandon blog comments (for example, if spam or unwelcome comments became a problem), then I would opt for having the commenting in the LMS discussion space, with each student having a discussion board space of their own that I could link to. The drawback here is that this solution would not work for students commenting on students in other classes. For other people, that might not be a problem at all, but for me that would be a huge drawback. Still, it would be do-able, and I consider the LMS to be my emergency alternative which I can put into play if needed. There are other possibilities too, like a dedicated Padlet for each student or a dedicated GoogleDoc or GoogleSlides. So, I do ponder these alternatives as "just in case" options, but my current system is working good enough (and I am definitely an advocate of good-enough... the rhetoric of "excellence" really leaves me cold; I'm very glad for good-enough solutions!).

Randomized commenting. The way I spread comments out through the whole class is by using a randomizer each week to assign students to comment on one another. The power of random means that, over time, the commenting gets distributed throughout the whole class (it's another good-enough type of solution; not perfect, but definitely good enough).

There are lots of different ways you can create a randomizer. Spreadsheets, for example, are a great way to randomize: just put the student names in one column, and put the blog links in another column, and then randomize one column (plus jiggle any individual item if a student gets randomly assigned to their own blog).

You can also create an actual randomizer that displays a link; that's what I do, creating a javascript randomizer that I can then put in the webpage with the assignment instructions. Here's a screenshot:


As you can see there in the screenshot, I ask the students to comment on each other's story posts and also the Introduction post at the blog so that they are getting to know each other over the course of the semester (and if they've already commented on the Introduction post at that person's blog, I ask them to pick some other blog post to comment on; each blog always has lots of posts, and it's fun to just choose any post of interest to comment on).

For more about randomizers (I LOVE RANDOMIZERS), here are notes to a conference presentation I made: Domains.LauraGibbs.net. I am proud to say that the tool I use to create these javascript randomizers, RotateContent.com, was built by a student of mine many years ago, and the tool is still going strong all these years later.


So, that's a very quick overview of the blog commenting process... and in the next post, I'll talk more about the culture of feedback in the class as a whole: Building a Culture of Feedback.



Labels:

May 31, 2020

More RSS: News, Podcasts, Padlet, etc.

Posted by

You can use any RSS feeds in Inoreader, which means blogs and also other RSS sources like Diigo. In this post, I'll provide a quick overview of some other places you are likely to find RSS.

And remember, if you can find the RSS, you can make it part of your content network at Inoreader, which means you can then export that content out to other web spaces like inside your LMS, your course website, in a blog, etc.

News Sources

 News sources often have RSS feeds, and they often have specialized feeds based on the different content areas that the news source includes.

Just as one example, our student newspaper, the OU Daily, has an RSS feed: OU Daily RSS. I can subscribe to that feed in Inoreader, and have that display inside Canvas LMS, etc.

I could also create a folder with different news sources; for example, here is an education news folder I use in my Inoreader:


One way to use news sources like this is to curate a stream of special interest to your students. So, for example, you can scan through the news articles in a folder, and use a special tag to indicate items of interest to your class, and then having that tag be the stream that appears in your LMS or in your class website.

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically blogs with audio enclosures! So you will find that many podcasts offer RSS feeds. A quick search of "podcast" for feeds that people have subscribed to already in Inoreader returns over 4000 results. That's a lot of podcasts! :-)


Not all podcasts will have easily discoverable RSS feeds, but if you have a favorite podcast and they have not made the RSS feed easy to find, contact the podcast developer. They probably can give you the feed address. If not, your inquiry might prompt them to turn on the RSS feature (for example, at SoundCloud, the RSS feed is not automatic, but it's easy for a podcaster to choose to turn on SoundCloud's RSS feature).

Padlet

Padlet is a popular tool with teachers, and it has RSS, so you can subscribe to new content in a Padlet via Inoreader. Just paste in the Padlet address, and Inoreader's autodiscovery will find the RSS feed for you:


So, if your students are creating content with Padlet in addition to their blogs, you can add the Padlet content feed into the same folder as the student blog feeds. It's all RSS!

Hypothes.is

I don't use Hypothes.is with my classes, but it is a powerful tool, and it has RSS features. Maybe somebody who is using Hypothes.is will experiment with Hypothesis RSS feeds in Inoreader.  Some resources to help with that:
Atom & RSS Feeds for Annotations (from Hypothes.is)
Hypothes.is RSS Feed Widget (from Alan Levine, RSS guru)
If you have examples or tips to share of Hypothesis RSS and Inoreader, let me know!


Okay, that is the last of my Inoreader blog posts; the remaining posts in this series will be about other aspects of running a student blog network, starting with Comments and Randomizers.



Labels: ,

More about RSS: Diigo

Posted by

So far I've emphasized RSS content from blogs (since the focus here is on running a student blog network), but you can also use Inoreader to collect and redisplay content from other RSS sources. In this post, I'll show how you can use the bookmarking service Diigo to generate RSS content.

Diigo Bookmarks

 I wrote a post here earlier about some basic Diigo bookmarking features, including how you can snag thumbnail images for the items you bookmark: Blogs and Diigo. See that posts for how to use Diigo to bookmark web content.

In this post I'll focus on how you can subscribe to Diigo RSS and then mix that content in with other content in Inoreader, exporting it to your class website or to an LMS.

Diigo RSS

 At the bottom of every Diigo display page, including search results, you will see the RSS icon, which you can click to get the RSS feed. The icon is to the right of the display options:

For example, here is the RSS feed address for the items that I've tagged with #ungrading:
https://www.diigo.com/rss/user/lauragibbs?key=d6f0bfedadf90c44b2909bdea8e9f77e&query=%23ungrading&sort=updated

It's a scary-looking URL and the contents are not user-friendly either, but that's exactly what Inoreader needs in order to turn that RSS feed into an Inoreader display, like this:


It's just like the feed for a student blog, except this time the RSS is coming from Diigo. One thing to note is that it does not update as quickly as a blog feed does (I think Inoreader pings the feed every hour), but you can hit the manual refresh button if you want Inoreader to ping the feed for the latest results.


With a pro account, you can also boost the refresh rate on selected feeds (you can manage feed boosts via the Subscriptions panel in your Preferences).

Inoreader Export for Diigo RSS

 So, just like you can export student blog content using HTML Clippings, you can do the same with these Diigo bookmarks that Inoreader grabs via the RSS. Why would you want to do that? Well, Diigo is one of those sites that blocks the use of iframe to embed Diigo inside another site. That means if you want to display Diigo bookmarks inside a website or inside the LMS, you need to use a service like Inoreader to do that.

So, in the same way that I embed the student blog stream in Canvas, I can display a Diigo bookmark stream in Canvas also. Here's a Canvas display of Diigo bookmarks related to feedback for example:


And here's an example of a Diigo stream embedded in a Google site; these are resources related to ungrading:


In both cases, I am using the Inoreader HTML Clippings to display those Diigo bookmarks, and it updates automatically as I bookmark and tag new items in Diigo.

Anywhere that you can embed an iframe, you can embed Inoreader content... which includes Diigo bookmarks. Even the thumbnail image shows up. Diigo is a powerful tool, and with Inoreader you can share your Diigo content more widely and in new contexts!


So, Diigo is one of my favorite non-blog RSS sources, and next up I'll provide a quick overview of more RSS content sources: News, Podcasts, Padlet, and more.





Labels: ,

Inoreader Search

Posted by

The Inoreader Search features are amazing; I'm not even going to try to document them all here. Instead, I'll refer you to this overview of Inoreader Search features (including the very powerful Active Search, which is a pro feature).

What I want to discuss here is the free Inoreader search feature which allows you to search all the content in your Subscriptions, including folder-specific searches. That is what gives you the ability to search all your students' blog posts. I use this feature in all kinds of ways, but one of the most important is to make connections between students.

For example, as I am reading the Favorite Places posts during the Orientation Week, one student might mention a specific city or vacation spot, etc., and I'll remember somebody (but who?) also mentioned that place; I just use Search to find the other student, and then I can leave comments for both students alerting them to their common interest. Or I'll notice that someone did a version of the story of how Ganesha got his elephant head; I can use Search to find other students who did a version of that story and let them know so they can compare versions, etc.

In the LMS, student content is spread out through different parts of the system (discussion, assignments, etc.), and there is no global search in Canvas (on the very sad subject of Canvas Search, see this post: The Paradox of Canvas's "Big Data" and Lack of Search). With an Inoreader student blog network, all the students' work leaves a trail in their blog, and Inoreader's Search feature lets me follow those trails and find connections.

One of the biggest advantages of digital content is being able to search that content. So, the lack of good search features in Canvas is one of its biggest drawbacks... while the search features in Inoreader are a big plus!

How Inoreader Search Works

 You can search in a specific feed (i.e. an individual student's blog), or in a specific folder (i.e. all the students in a class), or a specific tag (i.e. a specific assignment).

To search in a specific feed, for example, click on the feed in the left-hand menubar to highlight that feed, and then type your search term in the search box. You will then see results for that specific feed:


You can also click on various filtering options; for example, you can expand the search the folder level using that dropdown, as well as other search filtering options.

As always, the Inoreader URL is very clear, and you can even bookmark a search term if you want:
https://www.inoreader.com/search/subscriptions/music

The URL does not contain the feed-specific parameter; it just shows the search term: music. If you bookmark that URL, it will show you "music" across your subscriptions, which you can then delimit using the dropdown filters:


I don't actually have any search terms that I bookmark, but I really appreciate how Inoreader URLs work. If there is a search term you want to bookmark in your browser, you can do that easily!


Next up: I'm going to revisit the power of RSS and talk about RSS content sources beyond the blogging world, starting with Diigo RSS.



Labels: ,

Inoreader Star for Workflow

Posted by

I often joke that Inoreader is my LMS, and I certainly spend way (WAY) more time with Inoreader every day than I do in Canvas, my school's LMS. In this post, I want to describe one of my favorite features for workflow in Inoreader: the Star feature. If you use the Star feature in Gmail or Google Drive, you already know how the Inoreader Star works: it's a simple flag that you can turn on or off for any content item (i.e. any student blog post).

The way I use the Star in Inoreader is to let myself know that I've left a comment on a blog post. That's important for me in two ways:


Star for specific assignments. During the Orientation, I leave a comment on every student's Favorite Places Post and on their Introduction. Those are the only posts of the semester where I leave a comment on every post, and it takes me a while to do that. I finish all the Favorite Places comments during the first week, but it takes me another week or two to finish all the Introduction posts. To keep track of that, I go to the tag for that post and I use the list view, adding the star as I comment one each post:


I know I'm done when every post in that folder has a star.


Star for individual students. Aside from the Favorite Places and Introduction posts, my comments on people's blogs are random; the blogging space is really more for the students to interact with each other (I mostly interact with them through their projects). But I do comment on a few blogs at random each week along with posts the jump out at me for some reason in the stream, and I use the star to mark the blogs I've commented on. That means I can also look at an individual student's blog overall and see how often I've commented:


I rely on the randomizer to help me comment on everybody's blogs periodically, but I can also review all the blogs very quickly by clicking through them to see where there are stars.


So, the Star is very useful for me in keeping track of my interaction with the students in their blogs. Next up: the Inoreader Search feature, which I use to help me connect one student to another.



Labels: ,

Inoreader Bundles

Posted by

The Inoreader export in the form of HTML Clippings is a premium feature, but you can also combine and share feeds in the form of Inoreader Bundles, which is a free feature. For someone to view your Bundle, they also need to have an Inoreader account (again, a free account works). You can find out more at the Inoreader Bundles page; here's a quick overview step by step:

Make a Bundle

 To make a bundle, go to the Preferences (click on your user image in the upper right-hand corner), and then choose Bundles from the Collaboration menu.


You will then see the Bundles screen which lists all the Bundles you have made, plus a New button in the upper right-hand corner.

You can browse your feeds by folders as you add them to the Bundle, so if you have all your course-related feeds together in a folder, it's easy to add them quickly to the Bundle. (But remember, if you add new feeds to that folder later, you'll need to come back and add them to the Bundle too.)


Remember to click Save when you're done.

Share the Bundle

You can then click on the Share icon to get the address for the Bundle which you can share with others. For example, here's the address for the Summer 2020 Blog Fest Bundle:
https://www.inoreader.com/bundle/0014cd640a7d

As you can see, a Bundle URL is not specific to your account, although you are the only one who can edit the bundle. You can share this link and anyone with an Inoreader account will be able to view the Bundle. You have the same different viewing options for a Bundle as for other Inoreader content:


So, for example, here's the card view of that Bundle:


That's it! I don't have a lot to say about Bundles since I focus on the HTML Clippings export feature for sharing Inoreader content with other people. But if you want to use just the free Inoreader and make the class stream accessible to your students, this is one way to do that. Especially if you want your students to learn how to use Inoreader for themselves, a class Bundle would be a great way to get started.


Next up: one of my favorite features for workflow in Inoreader: Inoreader Star for Workflow.



Labels: ,

May 29, 2020

Blogs and Diigo

Posted by

This post may or may not be of interest: I want to say a few words about how I use Diigo as a way to manage blog content and workflow. Blog labels (tags, categories) are useful up to a point, but if you want to have even more powerful ways to keep track of the contents of a blog, especially if you are using the blog to manage hundreds or thousands of pieces of content, Diigo is a fantastic option. When I am doing major content development at a blog, I bookmark every post in Diigo and use Diigo to manage the content development and editorial workflow.

What is Diigo?

Diigo is a bookmarking tool that allows you to bookmark webpages (and, yes, blog posts are webpages!), while adding tags that you can then use for searching and filtering. You can also include chunks of text with each bookmark, either text that is automatically copied from the blog (what you have highlighted when you bookmark goes into the record) or content you add later. You can also snag thumbnail images to go with the bookmarks.


To see how that works, you can browse the Diigo account I currently use for content development. These are my 100-word stories, for example. For the 100-word story project, it's really ideal; I include the actual story in the bookmark!


Each of those items in Diigo links a blog post. I use labels at the blog itself for basic navigation, but I have a much more elaborate set of tags at Diigo that allow me to manage the book production process that I am using to select blog posts, edit them, and then arrange them into OER books. (That's a new project this summer; I am hoping to complete four microbooks: each one will have 200 of these 100-word stories).

Diigo Features 

 Diigo has a ton of features; I'll just list here some features that are of great value to me personally:

Boolean Searches. I'm able to use Boolean operators like NOT in order to search and organize my content. That's the single biggest advantage over the blogging label interface. Diigo is so powerful that way, and I can even bookmark those searches since the search parameters are in the URL. For example, a bookmark for the India stories that are going in the India book (versus stories I am skipping and saving for future use):
https://www.diigo.com/user/laurakgibbs?query=%23100india+NOT+%23india%3Askip

RSS. Diigo has RSS for tags AND for Boolean tag searches, and it even includes the thumbnail image in the RSS. More about Diigo RSS:
RSS: Diigo

Reports. I use the Report feature to snag content to use in my book drafting process for the 100-word stories. It works great! Here's what a typical report looks like; I copy-and-paste into my text editor: I just search, choose bulk-edit, then select-all, and then generate report:


Browser Tool. When I am bookmarking blog posts in Diigo, I use the browser tool to make that really fast. (I label the blog posts as Diigo:no or something like that; then, after I bookmark in Diigo, I change the blog label to Diigo:yes; that way I know what I've got where, and I can do a count of the posts to make sure I haven't lost anything in the process.) I'm usually using the Chrome tool, and there's a cross-browser bookmarklet here, plus mobile apps: Diigo Tools.


There's so much more I could say here, but I'll leave it at that for now. If people have questions about using Diigo to manage blog-based content projects, let me know and I'll be glad to elaborate in more detail. I've been using Diigo for a few years now, and I like it more and more with each project I complete.

And now........... on to blog networking with RSS and Inoreader: What is RSS and what is Inoreader?




Labels: ,

Blog Backup/Export

Posted by

I've covered the basic content side of blogging so far — creating a blog and posting, comments, labels, design, sidebar, pages — and now I'm going to finish up with some housekeeping and organizational tips.

In this post, I'll talk about how to export your blog for backup purposes and also for migrating from one blog platform to another. I'll be explaining how to do this in Blogger, and you have even more backup options (including auto-backups) in WordPress.

Blogger Backup

 To export a copy of your blog, just go to the Settings, and then scroll down to Manage Blog:


The option you will choose is Back Up Content.


When you click Download, Blogger will generate an XML file which will download to your hard drive. This will not affect the content of your blog; it's just a backup file that you can also use if you want to export the content to another Blogger blog or to a different blog platform entirely, like if you want to migrate your Blogger blog to a WordPress platform.

I've never actually had to restore a blog from a backup, but it's a good practice to have, and I encourage my students to back up both their blogs and their websites, just in case. (I've got an extra credit assignment they can do each week, backing up their work and also reviewing the week's announcements; here's how that works: Back-Up, Check-Up, and Review.)


Okay, that is a very important but not very exciting aspect of blog maintenance. Now on to something way more exciting: Embedding a Blog in Canvas (or any other LMS which allows site embedding).


Labels: ,

Posts and Pages

Posted by

In this post, I'll be talking about Posts and Pages. Posts is the usual term for the content you publish at a blog, and posts are generally displayed by date, newest to oldest. Pages, on the other hand, are a way to create content at a blog that is not date-based, and which usually has a separate navigation system. You can create Pages at Blogger and at WordPress; it's a pretty standard feature in blog platforms.

I'll confess that I don't use Pages a lot because I prefer to do my blog navigation by way of labels, and also by hacking the date/time stamp. But I have used Pages at some of my blogs, so I'll give an example of that below, and then explain how Pages work at Blogger. The Pages ecosystem at WordPress is way (WAY) more powerful than at Blogger!

Pages at my Myth-Folklore UnTextbook

 The UnTextbook is one of my biggest blogs, with thousands of pages to support the 100 reading units that I've prepared for students to choose from. Pages were useful to support semester navigation, as opposed to content navigation. So, across the top I have Week-by-Week Pages for navigation, while in the sidebar there is content navigation (short titles for all the units). You can see how that works here: Myth-Folklore UnTextbook.


Here's what that Pages area looks like in the Settings: Layout.


Below are some specific tips on creating Pages and designing the Pages navigation.

Pages Content

The Pages area is accessed through the left-hand navigation, and in the new Blogger interface, you add a new Page with the plus-button in the lower right-hand area (I'm still getting used to this new interface, but it will be useful for my students since it has a lot of design features in common with Google Sites, which they also use, like this plus-button).


The editor for a new Page works just like the editor for a new Post, except that there is no date/time stamp and no labels. The only settings for a Page are comments, and yes, you can have comments on Pages, like for a Post.


I'm using "About Me" as a sample Page here because creating an "About Me" area at your blog is typically the kind of thing you might do with a Page instead of a Post.

Pages Navigation

In Blogger, the Pages are something you add to the blog Layout. For some of the Themes, the Pages widget is already part of the default Layout, and for other Themes, you need to add Pages like you would add the other gadget options:


After you have added Pages to the Layout (and you can put the Pages cross-column along the top OR it can go in a sidebar), you can then click on Edit, and you will see a variety of options, turning pages on or off in the navigation display, and dragging-and-dropping for the order in which they appear:


Note that this is also how you can add links to external webpages as part of your blog navigation, organizing those links together with the Pages links.


So, in addition to the labels-and-dates way of organizing Posts, youcan also use these manual methods for designing the navigation of your blog site with Pages.


Okay, those are the basics of blog Pages... and next up is some housekeeping: how to back up and/or export your blog.

Labels: ,

May 24, 2020

HTML Sidebar Boxes

Posted by

The sidebar box I use most often is the HTML box, which allows both HTML and Javascript, as you can see:


The ability to use Javascript like this is one of the main reasons why I've always used Blogger instead of WordPress (the free WordPress.com blogs do not allow Javascript; I suspect that is also true of Edublogs, but I am not sure).

You can install as many of these HTML boxes as you want, pasting into the box whatever HTML, including Javascript, you want to use:


Here are just a few examples of the ways I use the HTML option at my various blogs:


Randomizing Javascripts

 In the sidebar of this blog, you'll see random mindset cats and random tarot cards, and those are just a few of the many randomizers I've created to use in my blogs.

I also share them with others! For example, if you want to use the mindset cats, you can get the javascript to copy-and-paste here: Random Mindset Cats. Here they are in action!


I use a free tool, RotateContent.com, to create the randomizers, and here's a presentation I made for Domains 2019 about that: Turn HTML Tables into Javascripts for Distributed Content Everywhere.

I also did a presentation on javascript randomizers for CanInnovate 2019: Javascript Magic in Canvas.

If you have questions about any of that, let me know. I'm always glad to preach the gospel of randomizing javascripts!


YouTube Playlists

 Even though they are tiny, you can embed YouTube playlists at width 200, height 125, and they will play in a sidebar.


That's my Maati Baani playlist, resized, which you can paste in a sidebar. For more about YouTube Playlists, see this earlier post: YouTube Videos and Playlists.


Google Slidedecks

 As my students create their projects, I create a slide in a slidedeck for each project, and then I can embed that slidedeck in the class announcements sidebar.


I embed the same slidedeck in the class projects webpage and in Canvas too. To embed a Google Slidedeck, just choose File: Publish to Web, and then select Embed, and customize the size (for a blog sidebar, 200 pixels is usually a good size):


I even added a randomizer to my Google Slides so that I can randomize the deck, putting different projects up at the top. I randomize the deck, and the new order appears everywhere the deck is embedded.


Twitter Widgets

 I have a dedicated class Twitter account, @OnlineMythIndia, which is separate from my own Twitter account, @OnlineCrsLady. The class Twitter feed is one of the most important parts of the class announcements blog because I can be adding new content all day so that there's always something new!

To embed a Twitter widget, just go to Publish.Twitter.com and paste in the address of the Twitter account, then choose Embedded Timeline, and then customize for width, height, etc.


You can embed ANY Twitter stream; it does not have to be your own. So, for example, you could embed your school's Twitter stream or the Twitter stream of your student newspaper, some other news source: any Twitter account you want!


Text-and-Image HTML

 In addition to the dynamic options above, I also sometimes create a static HTML box with just text and image. For example, the Suggestion Box box, with a link to the Google Form I use for (anonymous) suggestions.


The trick with doing text-and-image is that you do have to be able to host the image somewhere, displaying it by URL since the HTML box editor does not have all the editing options that the regular blog post editor does. For an example of combining a static image with a randomizing javascript, see this post: Yijing in the Sidebar! (You can use that same process to combine a static image with text, like in the example of the Suggestion Box.)


Okay, I think that's all I have to say about blogger sidebars, which means it is on to Posts and Pages.
Labels: ,

RSS / Email / More Sidebar Boxes

Posted by

If you added a Label navigation box, you saw that there were lots of different sidebar gadget options to choose from. You can explore all those on your own; in this post, I'm going to zoom in on the types of sidebar content I find myself using in my blogs.

RSS / Recent Posts

One of the options you can choose is Feed which allows you to add RSS feeds to your blog sidebar. You can find lots of information about RSS feeds in the Inoreader section of this blog. Right now, suffice to say that RSS is a way you can get fresh content from blogs, news sites, podcasts, etc.

So, for example, if you want to add a "Recent Posts" box to your sidebar, you can do that by adding the RSS feed of your own blog. Here's how that works:

1. Add box. Go to the Dashboard Layout, and select a new gadget sidebar box. This time, choose Feed:


2. Add feed address. Then, paste in the address of your blog in the dialogue box:


3. Configure. You will then see a preview where you can select various options, including the title you want to display in the sidebar box. You can change it to "Recent Posts" if you are displaying the recent posts at your own blog.


You can add as many Feed boxes to your sidebar as you want. So, for example, you could snag an NPR feed that is relevant to your class, a feed from some other news source, etc. There is a lot of RSS out there, and that's a great way to bring fresh new content to your blog sidebar.


Email Subscription

 Google acquired Feedburner.com several years ago, which is the service it uses for email subscriptions to blogs; it's an excellent service (I was using Feedburner before Google acquired it). To get lots more information about email options, you can log on at Feedburner, but the basic service works just fine. All you have to do is install the email box in your sidebar, and users can subscribe.


To see how that works, go ahead and subscribe yourself. You'll see that there is a confirmation email you have to click (that's to prevent spam), and then you will receive an email daily if there is new blog post content. Each of those emails also contains an unsubscribe link.

I always encourage my students to subscribe to the class announcements by email, and many of them stay subscribed even after the class is over because most of the class announcements content is for fun and exploration, which includes exploration even after the class is over.


Blog Search

 Another useful box to include is a search box, especially if you are using one of the dynamic themes that does not have a search box across the top of the blog:


One of my biggest complaints about Canvas LMS is that it does not have any search options for the course content in the LMS. Especially if you are using blogs to present course content to students, including a search box is a good idea.


Featured Post

 The "Featured Post" option is something that is included by default in some of the newer Blogger themes, and it can even be used in the post column, not just as sidebar content.


When you install this option, you can configure it in various ways which makes it quite useful:


I just wish you could install more than one featured-post box (the way you can install multiple label boxes), but unfortunately you can only install one Feature Post box in your layout.


So, those are some of the preset Blogger sidebar boxes that I really like, and next up is the make-it-anything-you-want sidebar option: HTML Boxes.


Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)