edna.edu.au

me.edu.au outages

me.edu.au users should note that since our major upgrade to the me.edu.au service on the weekend March 5th - 7th, that me.edu.au and the edna sign on have been unstable. edna user may have experienced intermittent error screens and difficulties logging in. We hope that these issues will be rectified as soon as possible.

If you continue to have issues please do not hesitate to contact me by leaving a message on my whiteboard.

Alison Hall
Coordinator of Online Communties | edna
Education Services Australia
www.esa.edu.au

Tags: logging in outages login
Posted at 05:16PM Mar 12, 2010 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

BlogFest Task 4

My post for Blogfest task #4 has been published over on my All in Bits and Pieces blog.Today's task was to share how you follow other bloggers and suggest at least ten blogs that you enjoy reading.

After you have read my post, feel free to leave a comment either here or over on my other blog. I am really interested to see what other blogs people follow. I keep thinking "These people who are such a wealth of information must also follow others that they find inspirational?"

Oh and before I forget, make sure you vote for your favourite BlogFest logo! You'll find a side widget from PollDadddy over on the BlogFest blog to cast your vote with.

Tags: blogfest
Posted at 02:12PM Jan 14, 2010 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Latest BlogFest post

Because of the flakiness of the Rollr blog we use here on me.edu.au I have written my blog post on embedding widgets on my other blog. You'll find it here. 

Only a few applications can be embeded here like YouTube and Voicethread as well as some other video embeds. I should compile a list of widgets that can be successfully embedded and some that I know don't go so well. More to come of that soon I think...

If you'd like to help me get started though, fill in this form to let me know you experiences with embedding content in your me.edu.au blog (item no.1 on the list is embedding this form from GoogleDocs into this blog post!):
Embedding content feedback form

I hope you have enjoyed seeing my progression through the BlogFest challenges and I feel that I am slowly gaining more confidence. I'm still taking a long time to write my posts though... 

Tags: widgets blogging
Posted at 04:30PM Jan 11, 2010 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Avatars and image editing

The second task of the BlogFest is Playing with Images. The focus of this task is to find some images and then have some fun with an editing program.

To make my image I visited Flickr and used the advanced search. I like to use the advanced search in Flickr because it means that I can choose to only see images which are Creative Commons-licensed and that can be used commercially, and most importantly for this challenge, images which can be modified, adapted, or build upon. So with that done I stumbled upon this image entitled Women of WiFi, after Caillebotte by Mike Licht, Notions Capital.  I then uploaded the Women of Wifi image to Picnik and started to play. Voila! I have to admit I didn't have to do very much as Mike had already poured his creativity into the image and I just built a smidge on it.

I initailly had a play with Big Huge Labs as it is an easy online editor which I have used in the past to create an avatar. I particularly like their Worholzer (now called PopArt) and for awhile it used to be my me.edu.au profile picture. However in the end I used Picnik to make my BlogFest logo and you'll find me around the web with this avatar picture although it's getting abit old now and due for a change. I like to use the same picture on whatever service I am using as think my networks will be able to find me a lot easier. Another reason why I also try and keep the same username wherever I go :)

About a year and a half ago I had a bit of a play with Build Your Wild Self. You can find that avatar and some more links to avatar makers and uploading profile pictures on one of my older blog posts.  You'll also find a collection avatar sites here in my Avatar list on diigo.

Posted at 04:07PM Jan 08, 2010 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[3]

The BlogFest begins

To help prepare myself for what 2010 will bring to me I am participating in the education.au BlogFest. The BlogFest will run from Jan 4th through 'till Jan 22nd and will be a way for my colleagues and I to learn a little more about blogging and hopefully create some great community discussion along the way. 

One of my biggest challenges with blogging is that I find it hard to put my thoughts into words. When I do find the right words it can takes forever to pull something together that I am happy with! So one of my goals for this challenge is to actually write a little more frequently but also to be less fussy about the end result. 

I also plan to stop "lurking" in the blogosphere so much. I have around 60 odd blogs which I follow and read fairly regularly (thanks to that wonderful browser, Flock!). I feel it allows me to keep my finger of the pulse of educational technology and educators because I am reading about the real experiences of educators. So goal number 2 is that I start leaving a few more comments around so that people know that I am reading and am interested in what they have to say. We all know how lonely it can feel when feel like we are writing to nobody. 

I'll be spreading my blogging over a few different blogs including this one and my All in Bits and Pieces blog depending on the challenge and the capability of the platform. Feel free to following along with our blogging journey by visiting the BlogFest and checking out the entries in the Mr Linky at the bottom of each post. 

Tags: blogging
Posted at 04:44PM Jan 04, 2010 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[3]

Early Years Bookclub

Would you like to communicate and share ideas with students from Kangaroo Island and Adelaide in South Australia, Sydney in New South Wales, Kaiiri in Far North Queensland and Jupiter in Florida USA? Then join the Early Years Book Club on OzProjects!

The Early Years Bookclub is an OzProjects space for early years learners up to the age of 8 years to explore online books and share class thoughts and ideas. You can introduce yourself to these participants in the Introductions Forum and then read nine fanatstic stories online.  This is a great interactive whiteboard shared reading activity.  Each story has links to activities and a forum in which to discuss the story, give your opnion or answer a question about the story such as "Should Jack have sold the cow for a bean? Why?"  Activities include making some puppets, building a snowman online or playing some online games to learn about rhyming words.

If you need any further information contact Cecily Wright here on me.edu.au or email ozprojects@edna.edu.au

Tags: ozprojects early childhood education
Posted at 02:43PM Dec 07, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Coast Care Week

Did you know that December 7-13 is Coast Care Week?  

The Celebrate the Sea OzProject at http://www.ozprojects.edu.au/course/view.php?id=16 includes many activities and resources to help you understand how to behave responsibly to look after our beaches.  Many of these activities and resources are suitable for use on an interactive whiteboard.  In the most recently added activity you can  learn some tips about preserving our coastal environment By reading the booklet 7 days in 7 ways and then trying an online sentence matching quiz to see how much you understand.

Contact Cecily Wright here on me.edu.au for more details or email ozprojects@edna.edu.au

Tags: ozprojects
Posted at 02:27PM Dec 07, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Social Bookmarking: Final release

Today's release has seen the completion of the final step in our implementation of Social Bookmarking functionality to me.edu.au.

For those that are unfamiliar with Social Bookmarking, me.edu.au's new Social Bookmarking will help you store your favourite websites and share them with your colleagues. It allows you to create your own filing convention by using 'tags' to name your selection of websites. For instance if you found a great website on Australian poetry, you could 'tag' it as English, Poetry, Australian, Australian Poetry etc.

Each me.edu.au user now has their own Bookmarks page called 'My Bookmarks '. The 'My Bookmarks' page allows you to organise your favourite sites. You can edit the bookmark title, description and community tags, as well as delete the bookmark completely. You can also highlight resources of particular interest using the new highlighting functionality.

me.edu.au Social Bookmarking will also recognise the bookmarks from other Social Bookmarking sites such as delicious and diigo and will add these automatically to your 'My Bookmarks' page. You can also control whether any other feeds you have added to your me.edu.au profile will flow directly through to your bookmarks page by going to the feeds tab on your 'edit profile' page. You can add new RSS feeds here from other places you are active, e.g. Twitter or external blogs, and use the tick boxes to decide what gets bookmarked.

Bookmarks added by me.edu.au users can be found through the search functionality and also the 'Bookmarks' filter on the search page. Your own bookmarks will appear higher on the search result list but you will also see what else has been bookmarked by me.edu.au users. You can visit your colleague's profiles and their Bookmark pages, and save any bookmarks of interest you find to your own page using the Bookmark icon.

Building on what has been released so far this year, me.edu.au will now notify you when someone has made a comment on an item you have bookmarked. You can control these notifications by going to 'edit profile' and then clicking on the notifications tab. Once you have made your choices, click save changes.

What other changes have happened in me.edu.au in the lead up to this release?

• Share and Add Bookmark bar - When viewing the 'My View' and 'My Bookmarks' pages, you will now see a box which says 'Add a link or a message'. This is where you can add new bookmarks. Just paste in the URL of the resource you want to bookmark (making sure to include http:// at the start), add any special tags or names of me.edu.au communities you are a member of and that you want to share the resource to, and add a description.

• Made a mistake?  - You can edit the title, description and tags of your bookmarks by editing them on your 'My Bookmarks' page.

• Commenting - As mentioned previously you may have noticed the new commenting functionality for resources shared in me.edu.au. You can now view who else has bookmarked and commented on the same resource, and contribute further to the conversation by going to the 'more details' page for a particular resource.

Tags: bookmarking aboutme about me help
Posted at 05:05PM Sep 29, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[2]

Approving blog Comments

By default the me.edu.au blogging tool is set so that all comments on a blog are hidden until the author of the blog approves them.

To approve blog comments on your blog, go to your edit blog page and then click on the 'Comments' tab.

To approve the comment, mark it as spam or delete it, click in the check box of the appropriate column next to the comment.Scroll down and save you choice.

The comment should now appear at the bottom of your blog post.

You can change these default comment moderation settings in the Preferences tab of the edit blog page in the comments section.

Tags: help blogging
Posted at 01:45PM Sep 11, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Adding Images to me.edu.au blog

Adding images to your me.edu.au blog isn't as straight forward as you think, but once you know how to do it, it is easy.

Click the Edit Blog link from your me.edu.au profile

Click on File Uploads



You may like to upload all the images you might use in your blog post first or I personally like to keep one window open on my blog post and the other on the file uploads area.

When an image is uploaded you will see the screen below and will need to copy the address of the image

If you miss this screen, you can find all your uploaded images stored in your File Uploads area.

Back in your blog post, place your cursor in the text area where you want your image to display and then click on the Insert Image button in the text editor.

Paste the URL of the image your copied from the File Uploads area into the Insert/Modify Image window, Image URL box. Click on the Preview button to see the image and write a description of the image in the Alternative text area. Click OK.

The image you inserted should now appear in your blog post.

Note: There is no autosave! If you have to navigate away to your File Upload area to get an image address, SAVE A DRAFT!

Tags: help images blogging showme
Posted at 10:44AM Sep 11, 2009 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[1]