Month: December 2006

Exc-el blogs: Event calendar plugin added

Firetree.net’s Event Calendar has now been added to the Exc-el blog system. It’s ideal for posting details of future school or class events, such as parents’ nights, homework due dates, test dates.

To add an event, you just create a Post for it in the usual way, so you can provide plenty of details. The only difference is that once you’ve enabled the Plugin, you’ll have event start date/time and event finish date/time fields you can complete at the bottom of your Write Post screen.

You can see it working here at the Education ICT News blog here: https://www.edubuzz.org/eduictnews, where it’s installed as a SideBar Widget.

Quick guide to setting it up:

    Activate the Sidebar Widgets plugin if you haven’t already (you’ll need a Widget friendly, eduictnews is using 3K2)
    Activate the Plugin but don’t try to view your blog yet!
    Activate the Event Calendar Widget plugin.
    Go to Options / Event Calendar, and choose a Category for event posts, say “events”.
    Set any other options, details here http://wpcal.firetree.net/options.

Full details are at http://wpcal.firetree.net.

BubbleShare test

[bubbleshare 98533.bb1a50558b6]

Have you tried BubbleShare yet? It’s ideal for sharing school photos, and couldn’t be easier to use. The Education ICT team included it in a recent “TeachMeet” CPD session at Law primary school, and it was well received. The ability to easily add clip-art and captions, including speech bubbles and call-outs, makes it easy to tell stories with pictures – and it’s fun! The example album from the Law session is here.

The album above is being displayed using the BubbleShare WordPress plug-in. All that’s needed in the post is a line like this (with square brackets at either end) where the code, from your album’s URL, simply identifies your album.

bubbleshare 98533.bb1a50558b6

WordPress: Google Analytics Plug-in installed

Robert Jones has enthused before about Google Analytics. He includes a screenshot.

At that time you needed to put a bit of code into your blog, which put it out of easy reach of Exc-el bloggers.

If you’ve an Exc-el blog, things have now become easier. Log in to your blog, head for the Plugins menu and activate the Google Analytics Plugin. You’ll need to register with Google Analytics, tell that your blog’s full URL, and get a User Account code. (It’ll look like UA-123456-7, and is in amongst the HTML snippet from Google.)

This awesome resource will enable students to see quite clearly what country their visitors are from (geography, modern studies…), which parts of the blog are popular (literacy, marketing, art, design,..) and also gather statistics for everything from pages read to links clicked (maths, numeracy, information handling…). There’s a lot of potential for collaborative work.

PodPress now installed

At Ollie’s request I’ve installed the PodPress plugin. It looks like it’s working OK, all I need now are some testers. Feedback appreciated. Of course, I’m not expecting us to be able to make full use of this until the school network upgrade is completed. Might be a good time now, though, to have a play.

Features Continue reading PodPress now installed