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So, in order to learn the ins and outs of Edublogs, I’m playing around with it.  Here I am going to try to display a short imovie I made for Linda Wise, Media Specialist at Como Park Senior High.

First, I went to TeacherTube and copied the URL of the video.  Then I clicked on the Video Icon in the Visual Editor of my post, pasted the URL, and gave it a title — wah-lah . . .

CPHS: Student Stories

Now I am going to embed the same video using the code TeacherTube provides.  If it works, obviously this second option is better because the video will be directly in the post rather than yet another click away.

So, now I’m going to click over to the HTML editor, paste the code below, and click publish:

Edit:  I tried this a couple of times and it didn’t work.  I’ll try again later.  For now, click on the link near the top of the post to see the video.

I have to say I’ve been a bit HTML-phobic ever since I had to use it way back in college to build websites for my education classes . . . come to think of it, that is probably WHY I’m phobic.  Anyway, the whole web 2.0 revolution has opened up a whole new world for people like me — we don’t NEED to deal with HTML because it is done for us like magic!

Well, most of the time . . . lately I’ve had to go in and play with the code to get pbwiki to do what I want.  And now it turns out that we have to use the HTML tab in Edublogs to embed things like videos and such. (Before you get confused, the “Add media” icons in the Visual Editor are for things downloaded to your computer or at a URL — not for things with code.)

The good part about this is that it sounds like you can embed almost anything.  The bad news is that you have to toggle back and forth between the “Visual” tab in the Editor and the “HTML” tab in the Editor.

For details see The (wonderful) Edublogger’s post about this.  Quick and dirty:  If you want to add an Animoto video or a GooglePresentation or anything with code . . .

• Write everything you want in your post using the Visual Editor first
• When everything is done EXCEPT adding the code, click on the HTML tab
• Find the place in the your post where you want to add the code
• Copy the code from wherever it is and paste it into the HTML Editor
• DO NOT CLICK BACK TO THE THE VISUAL EDITOR OR DO ANYTHING ELSE
• Just click “Publish” and wait for it to be done publishing.  When you go to “Visit Site,” your video (or whatever) should be there looking pretty

I just tried it with some GooglePresentations (post) and Animoto Videos (post) and it worked well.  One thing to be aware of — the next time I went to write a post the Editor was still in the HTML tab, so you may have to make sure that you are in the Visual tab every time. (I’m not sure, but it did that even though I have the Visual Editor set as my default.)

So, don’t be HTML-phobic — it is easy!  After all, it is really only copying and pasting, and we do that all the time anyway.

This is a cool site where you can spell things with copyright-free letters from flickr: Spell with Flickr.  Type a word in the box at the top of the page.  When the letters appear you can click on each one to get different pictures.  When you are satisfied with the letters in your word, copy the code in the box below the letters and paste it into your blog.  Note that you can choose to square-off the letters so that the images are all the same size.  Have fun!

My blog, “Finding My Way: Confessions of a Life-long Learner” has moved from Wordpress to Edublogs.  Since Edublogs is powered by Wordpress, this is not a very dramatic move (though there are a few differences between the services).  The main reason I moved is because Edublogs is — you guessed it — focused for educators.  So, the help section is particularly helpful for teachers and the forums contained teaching-related threads which I think could be very helpful.

Plus, the blog provided by Edublogs (theEdublogger) is great!