Get out there and get involved!

So there's this new thing called me.edu.au .... wow that's wonderful!.. I've joined...  but what do I do now?

A question I feel a lot of people are asking. Honestly, I feel the best way to utilise me.edu.au fully is to just be brave and put yourself out there. You may feel like you are totally alone but once you start to open up to the community and get involved you may feel differently! me.edu.au is meant to be a place for educators to share and collaborate, so lets get cracking!

Join: visit some of the me.edu.au communities and join them if they interest you and introduce yourself on the whiteboard.

Contribute: add some of the resources you regularly use to the left hand link sharing space of your communities.

Find: search for collegues, friends or people who have similar interest to you and add them as a collegue.

Write: Start up your me.edu.au blog. If you don't know where to start, try a few ideas suggested in some of the communities and from other blogs eg. About me, blogging community

Tag: make sure you tag your blog posts with relevant tags, but also with the names of the communities you'd like to share your blog post with. Once published, your blog post will flow through to those communities and appear as in the related links from edna and blogs box on the community pages.

Feed: gather RSS feeds of all the places where you do things online eg. flickr, wiki spaces, nings, other blogs, facebook, del.icio.us, diigo, twitter, plurk etc etc etc etc and put them into the feed part of your profile (edit my profile > feeds) Here is an example of the feeds I have coming through.

What will happen now? = Anything you add to your networks across the web will be picked up from your RSS feeds and displayed in your public profile. If your collegues also do this, you will be able to see what they are doing as well. Personally I think this is one of the best things that me.edu.au has going on right now.

So start joining, contributing, finding, writing, tagging and feeding so you can get the most out of YOUR community!

Tags: blogging showme communities me
Posted at 04:34PM Jul 11, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Feeling Shy?

 Sentence 3: How do I represent myself online?

Are you are feeling a little shy about putting your picture up for your me.edu.au profile, or having your students put photos of themselves up on blogs and projects? Why not create an Avatar! edna has some great links to interactive, fun and kid friendly avatar makers which you can then use to represent yourself or your student when online.

Here's one I created with a nifty little online avatar maker called BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF whilst on my learning journey around the web (you will find more listed in edna by following the link above).

To add your avatar to your profile, simply go to "edit my profile", and click on the Image tab and then upload your avatar and save. Then stand back and admire!

How did I embed my avatar pictures into this blog post? Check out About Me's instructions in the blog post Adding Images to a Blog.

Tags: cooltools showme image avatar
Posted at 03:25PM Jun 26, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[1]

embeding video into blogs

Sentence 2: Today I learnt how to share video content with others on my other blog, all in bits and pieces.

The videos are from YouTube and are of teachers demonstrating to other teachers how they use their interactive whiteboards. I found them on the RSC-Northwest eMagazine page from Lancaster University  and simply copied the embed HTML provided by the YouTube block and pasted it into a HTML block in my own blog.Voila instant teacher inpiration goodness!

The special thing about these videos is that once you have watched the first one, a whole series of other related videos appear within the YouTube block. This means you can watch a series of videos which are all related in subject matter without leaving your blog page. Pretty cool huh?!

This little YouTube gadget also gives you the option of embedding a hard link into your blog which will whisk users off to a YouTube page. Still cool but I think having the block in your own page is great idea. Havn't quite learnt how to create my own series, but the possibility of having all your YouTube videos streaming to a personal or educational online space, without having to navigate away would, possibly, solve a few access issues.

To add the video to this blog, I had to click on the "toggle HTML source" button when I was in the writing pane and then paste the video's HTML code exactely where I wanted it to appear in the post. Easy! (after a little help from my friends...)

Tags: whiteboards demonstration interactive whiteboards showme embed video
Posted at 12:13PM Jun 25, 2008 by Alison Hall  |