THUMBS UP TO SLIDESHARE - GREAT FIX 8-D

I am feeling so lucky to belong to such a responsive and caring community. The problem we had with our slide shows has been resolved. SlideShare came to our rescue.

We had an amazingly quick and much appreciated response not only from SlideShare but from caring bloggers - Allanah, Tom and others. Thank you all very much.

As soon as I realised the problem and danger it posed, I posted my concern on the feedback panel at SlideShare and received the following in my inbox. Allanah showed the benefits of Twitter in getting an almost immediate response and has given me more food for thought in the benefits of Twitter.

For a clearer view of Amit Ranjan's fix you can visit the following visit: http://blog.slideshare.net/2008/03/11/how-to-turn-off-related-feeds-at-the-end-of-slideshows/

Hopefully other sites mentioned by Tom will take a leaf out of SlideShare's book and provide the same type of option.

THE DANGER OF EMBEDDED LINKS :-(Has now been resolved - See Above 8^)

Has anyone else come across any problems or potential dangers in uploading slideshows using slideshare and the like into class blogs? We use classblogmeister because we like the safety features for our classes. Nothing is posted on the site unless it has teacher approval. We felt comfortable in using this as a tool for our students as it provided such a safe environment.

We have just discovered a danger in doing this.

Uploading a presentation to slideshare of a junior class maths activity that our class was so proud seemed great. We copied and pasted the link provided by slideshare into our class blog. Looked pretty good we thought. It wasn't until another teacher viewed it sometime later that we realised our folly. At the end of the slideshow, the slideshare web site links your presentation to others that are similar - and that is where the problem occurs. We didn't expect there to be any inappropriate links at all, no inappropriate maths links - in fact we didn't even think about it - but there definitely are. Phew! We are so glad we found this before any of our children - or their families.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Perhaps we could share here some of the dangers involved in what we are doing and the sites we are linking into our class blogs? This has come as an awful shock. To think that we could have exposed our 5 year olds to such material!

I would be interested in hearing from more experienced users.. and others who share a similar concern.

TE RANGA BLOGS!

Thursday afternoon and Te Ranga Staff will be exploring blogs. Classblogmeister is great and as a tool for learning it withstands my crap detector. It supports learning which is Authentic, Rich Real & Relevant.

I am exploring still and WoW! I have just uploaded the image of the Nga Tii Roa and me! I was surprised it was so simple...

Images have to be compressed to less than 65kb (I think). I used MS Picture Manager to do this. Once saved on my computer, I went into my classblogmeister page, then to Control Panel and way down at the bottom there is an option to upload the images.
1. Class Image will appear in upper LHC of the blog pages of all your students, and all your articles
2. Personal Image will appear in upper right corner of all your blog pages but not the students

I hope Maketu will try this out too.

Class Web Pages:

This afternoon we looked at a website for Pukehina. Following John Phelps advice we are going ahead using Front Page. We also discussed each class having their own page and how Classblogmeister could fit so well into this aspect. What I liked was that nothing would be published without the prior approval of the teacher. Remember too to have student and parent permissions to publish student work and photos and to use the Internet, email etc. Well we were off. Grace and John both registered and created a class page each. Well the initial stages of them anyway. We learnt that:

- To register you each have to register the school.
http://classblogmeister.com/?blog=rethink
You are then each given our own unique log in password (scroll down to see this).
- In Edit mode you see adverts etc. These do not appear on your published blog unless you specify this.
- Once logged in, enter your specific details, own password etc,
- You can choose one of 8 templates and provide a title for your blog
- Select "articles" link to post your comments on to the blog
- To add students, you need to add a class first. Click on the Class link and then Class Roster.
- Under Display names we chose first name and last initial for safety reasons
- Pictures can be added if they have been uploaded to flickr first. To load images on to flickr you need to join. http://www.flickr.com/ To join you will first have to register for a yahoo account if you don't have one already.

We struck a problem adding pictures uploaded to flickr until I discovered they were actually gifs that we were clicking on. When we tried it again with jpg files we had no problem at all

1. We copied the URL of the image from the image properties
2. In the article box we typed all the following inside sharp brackets: img src="image_url" width="pixels" align="direction"
3. We replaced img_url with the image URL
4. We replaced pixels with the pictures pixels approx 72 pixels per inch
5. We replaced direction with either left or right depending in which side we wanted the image to appear.

Students - you too can also add podcasts. These can be created in Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ It's free! Once done, export as an mp3

Classblogmeister: http://classblogmeister.com

Have you thought of having your own interactive class webpage? One where each student can post their own reflections and learning blogs? One where you as the teacher can oversee the content?

Classblogmeister, David Warlick's online blogging tool, is designed for schools with the safety features in mind. This site is amazing and allows everyone in your class to create your own learning blogs, build partnerships and respond with other classes and teachers online.

Let's face it, our kids are doing it anyway (beebo, myspace etc) but they have been given few if any guidelines to using this new media. Make the best of both worlds and use their tools within an educational setting to provide a platform which is rich, real and relevant.

I have this blog already but classblogmeister seems ideal for a classroom forum. Each person in your class can have an online presence which allows everyone to read and write with the world. This is an exciting platform to support your class learning and would be my most favourite find this year. Thanks to Tom and Jody for introducing it to me. Take a look at their class blog sites:

- Jody's Year One site: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1638

- Tom's site: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=993