As if…

…you needed any more email.

I’m not sure if any of you know of this resource or not, but SUNY Oneonta runs some really excellent email listservs as a community resource for teachers (primarily in New York State, but not limited).  I have my email client set to dump emails from this listserv into a specific folder and then I read it when I get a chance.  The Earth Science list community is very strong and has over a thousand members on the list, but the other subjects are a bit less active.  Still, it’s a great electronic resource for all sorts of things from labs to State Ed. administrivia.  This has been one of the most enduring professional development routes I have ever taken and it always provides lots of food for thought.  Plus, it has allowed me to network across the state and create some cultural capital with other science educators.

Some more info on listserves here.

Freedom School Photos

Freedom School photos are linked online now at my Flickr site.  Enjoy.  Oh, and I highly recommend Flickr as a photo hosting resource.

WordPress and Blog Addresses

Hey everyone,

So here’s my little lesson on the addresses to your blog….if you mess with them, you blow up your blog.

But seriously, from the dashboard go to Settings on the right hand side.  It will open up the General tab.  On this tab are options to change your blog’s name and add a clever line below the name on your blog’s main page.

Right below the tagline section are two sections named WordPress address (URL) and Blog address (URL).  These addresses point to the server space that houses our blogs.  If you change them, this messes up the connection and you or anyone else are unable to access your blog.  Trust me, I did it.  I thought I could change the teacherthomasp name to something that I liked.  Fortunately, by screwing it up, whoever fixed it did change the server file information, so in the end I got what I wanted.  Maybe there is a legit way to do this???

Blogging Tech Tips

Here are some tips on working with the our WordPress blogs.

• Widget troubles? If you go an choose a different “Theme” (log-in, go to “Design” and click any thumbnail) you might not realize that some themes have limited features. The main limit I have seen is that some themes don’t allow you to easily customize and move around your widgets. (Widgets are the sections of links, blogrool, recent posts, login link, etc. that appear in the sidebar of your blog. Dynamic Widgets refers to your ability to drag and drop the widgets to change their order and content – this is done by logging in, clicking “Design” then clicking “widgets”.) SO if you choose a Theme which doesn’t support dynamic widgets, you will see a message to that effect, once you choose a new theme and click “Widgets”. You can still change the widgets in themes that don’t support dynamic widgets, but it’s pretty involved – you have to edit the HTML and CSS by hand. So anyway, if you aren’t into HTML and CSS, choose a theme that supports dynamic widgets.
• FYI, you can change your theme anytime, and it will not erase your previous posts – it just puts a new skin on your entire blog (all posts, old and new).
• To modify the links in your blogroll: Log-in, click on “Manage”, then click on “Links” – this is where the links are that are in your blogroll widget.
• How to turn off the need for moderation (approval) in comments: Log-in, click on “Settings” (top right of page) and then click “Discussion” over on the left.
• If you want to put a link in a comment, you need to know a little bit of really simple HTML. Here’s an example of what the code looks like to make a link to Google:

Check out this cool search engine called

<a href=”http://www.google.com“>Google!</a>

Useful Utility: PureText

Here’s the link to the free PureText utility that was mentioned in class. It’s the kind of thing that you might not realize you need, and then you try it and you wonder how you ever got along without it. It’s very handy for getting text from Word or a web page into WordPress, with no formatting (which can sometimes make things messy/complicated.) It basically just strips the text formatting from whatever is in your clipboard at the moment.

“Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source?”

PureText is Windows-only, but this blog post refers to a similar utility for the mac called PlainClip.

Hope this is useful.