Assignment 2 Report

This report is an reflection  on my blogging experience of creating a PLE click on the following links to read in detail.

My Blogging Experience

Limitations of Blogger

Useful websites while blogging

Free templates and widgets

My teaching experience

Conclusion

References

My Blogging Experience

The subject ICT lead me to a very interesting aspect of computing which is Blogging. I had no previous experience in blogging and was a novel to it. But with every passing day I learnt new tips and tactics.  I learnt a variety of things starting from setting up a blog to adding new widgets and manipulating the blog template. I found a lot of helpful tips on the web, and whenever I was stuck I would google the problem and there was always a soulution for it. I enjoyed the whole experience of setting up a blog.

Limitations of Blogger

My first choice to set up the blog was Blogger, though blogger is a wonderful environment, I found some shortcomings as I progressed with the blog creation. I some times wondered if wordpress would have been an better option for this. Blogger doesn’t allow to trackback comments where as wordpress does and in blogger the home page is the only dynamic page and all the other pages created are considered to be static pages. Static pages don’t allow to add multiple posts  and also doesn’t allow to add jump breaks. These issues donot come up in wordpess.

Useful websites while blogging

I found a lot of useful websites which helped and provided tips about blogging. These websites covered a lot of issues like  how to create labels, label clouds.,How to add html to blogger,How to reference posts and many more. Some of the websites I found very helpful are bloggerBook (blogger book), the original blogger (the originalblogger tips and tricks).

Free Templates and widgets

I came across websites which provide a lot of templates which can be used in blogger (Btemplates). I did add a few widgets in my blog which are the Sudoku, calendar and the weather widgets. but the widgets the websites provide are limitless. I would suggest that it would be worthwhile to visit these websites and explore the myriad options they have (Widgets for free).

My Teaching Experience

My placement was in Ivanhoe Girls Grammar and I enjoyed every minute of it. I found it to be a wonderful learning experience. I taught Information technology to Year 7 students, this was a multimedia based course , and in my blog I have created a list of resources which were veryhelpful to me though out my teaching. You can access this list by clicking on the following link which is a part of my blog.

Conclusion

Though I started off  as a inexperienced blogger, this whole process of creating a blog made me get in touch with the many prospects of the WWW. I think Blogging is the best way to share knowledge and information on the web in different formats such as audio, video text and images, which can be word documents to slideshows.The possibilities of blogging are endless.

 

Bibliography                                                          

blogger book. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 15, 2011, from http://www.blogger-book.com/2007/12/label-list-what-is-it-and-how-to-use.html

Btemplates. (n.d.). Retrieved June 15, 2011, from http://btemplates.com/

the originalblogger tips and tricks. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 15, 2011, from http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/2006/05/creating-categories-step-by-step.html

Widgets for free. (n.d.). Retrieved June 15, 2011, from http://widgetsforfree.blogspot.com/

                                                                                                                                     

Adding Widgets

Blogger has many inbuilt widgets which are pretty simple to add, and Blogger also allows us to add widgets from external websites. I have added a sudoku, weather and calendar widget to my blog, I obtained them from a website called  widgets for free. This website also provides for free templates for blogger. Have fun exploring the website.

Adding links within blogger posts

I wanted to add links between posts in my blog, a little search on google and I came across this wonderful page that was very useful, it clearly spoke about how to go around adding links between posts in the blog and also how to add links within different sections of the same post. Its a very simple procedure all you have to do is add a anchor tag in the "edit HTML" option of the post.
<a href="url of the post">link name </a>

The following link will give a detailed description about adding links between posts.
http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/2010/11/add-internal-links-within-blogger-posts.html

Tracking back comments

Blogger doesnt have an inbuilt support for comment trackback, I tried adding the functionality by using greasemonkey (a user script manager for firefox) and downloaded additional plugins for supporting trackback. But I was not successful. If any of you have succeeded to add trackback facility for blogger then I NEED YOUR ADVICE.

The following link provides instructions on how to download greasemonkey and scripts.
http://andybeard.eu/809/blogger-trackback.html

Label Cloud

I was previously using the label list widget provided by blogger, but when I came across "Blogemus" a label list widget provided by bloggerbuster, I was quite impressed ."Blogeumus"  is a flash animated label cloud for blogger. It was quite easy to add this widget, The site provided html code which I copied and added in the bloggers layout

To learn more about adding labels Adding a label

Click on the following link to see how you can add the label cloud

http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/08/blogumus-flash-animated-label-cloud-for.html

Adding HTML to posts.

Adding html to blogger posts is quite easy, I added a table in the resources page to organise the videos. All i did was to go the the "Edit html" option which sits at the top of the post and added basic html commands for adding a table.What you see below is the code I used to create a table and add various table data elements. this code is from the "Resources" page in my blog.

Restrictions while using labels In Blogger

I realized the restrictions while using labels, Blogger allows us to add labels to posts that exist  on the home page, The other pages also called as the static pages do not have the option to add labels. Also I would like to mention that blogger does not allow to add multiple posts on static pages.

Adding labels

Labels are also called as tags and categories, they are very easy to add in blogger. Labels are added to posts and will appear at the bottom of the post.To add a label enter a label name at the bottom of the post while creating a post in the option provided. A label is not of much use unless it is added to a label list which is an inbuilt gadget in blogger.
If you have a set of related posts they can all be labelled with the same name, for example I have labelled 3 of my posts related to school placements as "Placements". The label  list will have an option called "Placements" anyone interested in reading about this will click on the "Placements" which will bring up all the related posts.

References:

Blogger book. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 15, 2011, from http://www.blogger-book.com/2007/12/label-list-what-is-it-and-how-to-use.html

The originalblogger tips and tricks. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 15, 2011, from http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/2006/05/creating-categories-step-by-step.html

 

Placement for 2nd Semester

I have been placed at the Grange secondary college (Hoppers crossing) for the second sem. Looking forward for my placement.