Things worth paying for?

The crafty folks at Edublogs just got my money.  I’ve used my edublog for the past few years as a quick way to post content (videos, instructions, review games) for my students.  Since I don’t use it much in the summer, I was surprised when I got an email from a colleague saying she couldn’t embed a glogster page on her edublog.  After checking it out, I found that I couldn’t either.  It turns out that edublogs has turned off the ability to embed most codes in the free version.

Edublogs, I think, is running WordPress MU (MU is actually a fully integrated part of WordPress now).  For certain installations of WordPress MU, users have to load a special plugin (this link is probably outdated) or change some permissions on the admin end to allow embeds (thanks Jill L. for the tip).  Apparently, Edublogs figured they could get more pro users by turning it off.

The bottom line is that I finally caved and paid the $40 US for Edublogs pro.  I’ll try and get a grant to cover it later because I think I’ll set up student blogs on the platform.  While I thought about moving to another platform (for free), I had a lot of posts and felt invested in the edublog anyway.  It appears that a lot of other sites are looking for revenue in new ways too.  Glogster is advertising heavy for their Pro version and ClassTools.net is now offering an ad-less “Premium” membership.  I use these a lot with my students and really hope the free versions remain without too many things stripped from them.  It’s sad to see great tools moving to paid versions, but I understand the time that goes into creating and maintaining these sites.

Coming in the next 2 or three weeks, however, I’ve got a story from the creator of a site I cherish that has pledged to always remain free.  Stay tuned.

Alternative Uses for Glogster Edu

For the past 4 years, my homeroom classes have built a website about recycling and clean energy use. Every year, we’ve used a different platform to build the site. I’m always looking for a way to make it easier for the students (and myself). The first year we used iWeb, but were restricted to one computer.  For the second GM site, we used Kompozer, but this was a huge pain and didn’t allow for much creativity with page elements.  Last year we used Yola, which was awesome, but made student corrections a little tricky.  This year, we’ve added three new sites to the Green Monkey family – a blog, a wiki, and a hybrid site (under construction).

The hybrid site is a combination of Yola and Glogster EDU.  One of the limitations of Yola is that there is only one user/administrator for a site.  To get around this, I log into my Yola account on several computers and set up the individual pages for the student groups.  The students can then work on their pages.  Unfortunately, if they need to make a change to their page, I have to log them back into my Yola account.  This is a cumbersome process if you have to do it on 7 or 8 computers several days in a row.

To get around this, we used Glogster EDU.  With Glogster EDU each student gets his own account (setup by the teacher) and can construct their own “glog.”  I had the students start a glog with some specific formatting for the background and then let them go to town on their page with the content they’d researched.  Once they’d gotten started, I logged them into my Yola account and had them embed their glog onto a Yola page.  We did this all in one day and once we got the glogs embedded  I didn’t have to log students into my Yola account anymore. (See student sample – it’s pretty cool).

In the process, the students learned how to embed content onto a web page and got to dig around with the embed code to make it fit properly.  The default embed for the glog is too big (not sure how to fix this on the Glogster side), so the students had to do a little math and fiddle with the height and width to make it fit.  From there, they could go back to their glog and make any changes they needed.

Favorite Apps for the New Year

Around this time, for the past couple years, I’ve resolved to write more posts. This usually goes well for about a week or two until classes get into full swing and I end up with a lot less time on my hands. I’ve got some more teaching duties this semester, so it’s folly for me to say I’ll be posting more, but here are some things I’ve been using lately and hope to use more with my students this semester (individual posts to follow).

1. Drop.io – I’m in the process of overhauling the movies page on mrmansour.com and drop.io is the backbone of it. With drop.io you get an online storage space where you can ‘drop’ any file and then view, download, or embed it from anywhere. There is nothing especially amazing about this concept, it’s just really easy to use. I also like it because I can host any movie I want and won’t lose the sound on it. Some movies I upload to youtube get the sound cut out due to their strict interpretation of fair use – this isn’t a problem with drop.io.

2. Weebly and Yola – Both of these web apps allow users to create super easy websites.  I’ve been using weebly for some presentations my students and I have done lately because it’s very easy to set up accounts so the audience can participate and create as we present.  My 6th graders will be completing their Green Monkey Business website when we return from break using Yola and Glogster (see below).

3. Glogster EDU – Before break, and before our invention unit, the 6th graders built glogs about environmentally friendly practices for businesses.  They embedded the glogs onto a Yola site and can now update the site without having to go to Yola.  They just have to update their glogs.  This is nice because you can’t access a Yola site from multiple accounts, but embedding glogs allows you to do so.

4. iPod Touch Apps – During our invention unit, the 6th graders had to design an app for the iPod touch.  As part of the project, they had to investigate apps similar to theirs on the iTunes app store. (See partial student sample below – it doesn’t have the screenshots which they had to hand draw). Some of the students did their research on my iTouch and one student brought in his own.  I’m hoping to acquire some more of these to use for projects in the future.  The students are naturals and I’ve been experimenting with some free educational apps (Math Drills Lite is an excellent one) that we could use.  I’ve also started reading my first book on the iTouch using the Kindle App.  At first I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book on the iTouch, but it’s actually quite enjoyable.