I thought I’d be able to copy and paste some text here (from an entry just posted to a Blogger blog), but apparently that produces a "run-time" error(?). so I try with this small post and then will write about it if it works…

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(I can’t see the bullets getting added )

Gladys

Visit Options > Forums when you’re logged in and create a forum (it takes about 10 seconds!). Then just copy and paste the page code provided into a post or a page and.. hey presto, you can host your very own forums that easily!

It’s a brilliantly simple way to have whole class discussions, provide great Q & A facilities or get your colleagues together on one space.

And what’s more now you don’t have to worry about whether your students should use learnerblogs, uniblogs or eslblogs – as Edublogs.org is now open to everyone – which means that your students can really easily participate in your forums as you can all sign up to the one advertising free site.

There’s more information here: http://edublogs.org/2008/02/26/come-together-and-chat-on-our-new-forums/

With the option to have static webpages as well as traditional blog posts, setting a fixed front page, and an integrated Wikispace into our Edublogs, plus the just-added forums, I wonder where we can draw the line and keep calling our Edublogs simply blogs… Actually, they become closer to a richly featured personal website everyday! 8-D!!

Gladys

NOTE: Larry Ferlazzo highlights posting to these forums is restricted to Edublog registered users and comments cannot be moderated. This might be a limitation for schools, especially when working with young learners (they might reveal personal info). With adults I wouldn’t be concerned, as posters are clearly identified, which prevents spamming!

First thing you may try is to click on “Upload/videos” (below the box where you are drafting your post”. Then you get a message that reads:

Embedding videos is easy

To embed a video simply:

* Click on the yellow ‘A’ button in your text editor (or ‘Media’ button if you have rich text editing turned off)
* Copy and paste the URL of the video you want to embed into the area provided

Now when you click on their lovely “yellow ‘A’ button” (or ‘Media’ button, for that matter), you get a number of options listed, for all of which Edublogs will gladly take the video URL and embed it into your post.

Now, if you want to embed a video from TeacherTube into your edublog, that is not one of the options, and trying to paste the code that they provide next to “Embeddable” will not work.  Do you need to give up? No way! Just make sure to scroll down the TeacherTube page and copy the code especially provided for Edubloggers and paste it into your text. At first you’ll only see the caption line (”Download video”… etc), but when you publish your post, it’ll work!

You can see an example here.

So, if you ever find yourself struggling to post with the plain looking code (that is, you can only see tabs like “code”, “img” and “link” when writing your posts, go to your blog settings and make sure the option “visual editor” is checked.  You should then be able to see icons similar to what you have in Microsoft Office suite.

Something else: in the visual editor bar there is an icon that looks like a blue square with lots of mini-squares inside. That shows/hides what is known as the “advanced bar”, giving you a total of 30 icons (that’s what I can see right now).

What a relief!

Gladys

PS: apologies for not posting images!