Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Adding Power Points to a Blog

A few days ago I followed directions suggested by participants in the Yahoo group Learning with Computers to set up an Ellg account to upload a Power Point presentation for the purposes of later uploading it to my blog. After that I tried several times unsuccessfully to add the URL for the Power Point to the template of this blog.

Then I used SnipURL (a great little program that allows you to shorten long URLs and assign them names) to shorten the original URL of the presentation. For some reason, the template accepted this and I have now successfully uploaded the presentation.

Networking combined with some experimentation can work wonders!

Monday, October 02, 2006

Expert bloggers

My students recently created their own blogs following the directions in their text and seem quite interested in using blogs in their future teaching.  I asked them to create a blogroll of links to either other students’ blogs or blogs of well-known bloggers.

Practically no one chose the well-known bloggers and that disappointed me because I was hoping that this would be a good way to expose the students to the blogs of experts in the field.  Perhaps they will become familiar with these authors when they do their rss feeds, but if not, the next time I teach a similar course, I will require that they link for expert blogs.