Blogging Links

There are many useful resources on blogging – here’s some to get you started:

See in particular http://www.ablogsnotjustforchristmas.blogspot.com/ – which includes an excellent presentation on Blogs, given by Val Vannet at the 2007 SAGT conference.

Guides to setting up a Blog:

Having run an INSET course for school colleagues on this I have written a guide to setting up your own wordpress blog:

• Starting A Blog – Setting up Your Own Blog – A teacher’s guide to setting up and running an educational blog
• Other INSET materials looking at blogs, including a powerpoint can be found here http://igeog.wordpress.com/ict-trainingst-ivo/blogs-and-wikis/

Setting up a Blogger Blog:

• John Barlow, a geography teacher from Archbishop Blanch’s School has also written an excellent guide to setting up a Blogger blog that can be downloaded from here

BLOGS AND BLOGGING – An Introduction..

• Quick guide – Blogs and Blogging http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5283248.stm
• Blogger http://www.blogger.com/start – For more details see – Blogger – The Amazing Website Machine http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42372 -
• There is a useful tutorial for starting up a blog on blogger on Andrew Field’s Revise ICT site – http://www.reviseict.co.uk/blogging/
• Word Press http://wordpress.org/
• Blogs make Links Easy (based on experimentation by Musselburgh Grammar School on the use of Blogs) – by Ewan Mcintosh
• Blogs to support Education
• All About Blogs
• How do I write a blog or make a podcast
• ICT IN Education – Blogs
• Digital Learning – pods and blogs

Blogging Tools

• Blogger http://www.blogger.com/start – For more details see – Blogger – The Amazing Website Machine http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42372 – also there is a useful tutorial for starting up a blog on blogger on Andrew Field’s
• Word Press http://wordpress.org/
• Live Journal http://www.livejournal.com/
• My Blog Site http://www.myblogsite.com/
• Xanga http://www.xanga.com/
• Windows Live Spaces http://spaces.live.com/

Blogs – Adding Content / Widgets

• Clustr Maps (mapping visitors) – http://clustrmaps.com/
• Amazing Counters (counter) – http://www.amazingcounters.com/
• Slideshare (upload and share powerpoints) – http://www.slideshare.net/
• Rock You (photosharing / online photo show- http://www.rockyou.com/
• Vizu (Web polls) http://www.vizu.com/
• 4Shared – Online File Storage – http://www.4shared.com/
• Weather Pixie (graph showing weather around the world) http://weatherpixie.com/
• Scribd (putting word documents online) http://www.scribd.com/
• Animoto (make your own professional looking video shorts for free (longer videos can be made at a small cost) http://www.animoto.com/ (videos can be embedded into the blog)
• Gismoz – create animated characters / videos for your blogs (with voice overs) http://www.gizmoz.com/create/general
• Voki – create your own talking virtual characters for embedding in blogs http://www.voki.com/