Jonesieblog

It’s over! I’m too tired to say much, other than that it went well, and that being responsible for the safety, enjoyment and learning of 149 people was an intense, draining and fascinating experience. I’m glad to be relieved of that responsibility now though! Here’s a wee video clip of one of the boys getting over-ambitious on a wee kicker we built:

Stumble it!

So you’ve read the earlier Blogging for Beginners posts in this series, and you’ve set yourself up with a feed reader? Maybe you’re wondering where to find the good stuff to subscribe to?

One solution is to gradually build up a list of blog feeds based on the people you know, folk that comment on your blog etc. This is an important part of the process, and what I’m about to tell you won’t do away with that feed-by-feed addition of blogs to your feed reader - finding interesting blogs and subscribing to them is part of the fun of blogging!

The shortcut solution is to find a list of blogs relevant to your interests and add them all to your feed reader in one go. Lists of feeds can be stored in a format that your feed reader can import automatically - this format is called OPML.

So, where do you find OPML files to import into your feed reader? Well, one good place is Technorati, where you can grab the results of a blog search in an OPML file. For example, this page lists 83 blogs about geography, and you could import them all into your feed reader in one go using the OPML link on the page.

If you are in the Scottish Education world, I’d like to plug the scotedublogs.org.uk blogs page, which enables you grab OPML files of Scottish education blogs filtered by authority and tags

One word of warning - go easy with OPML, and think about putting imports into suitably named subfolders in your feed reader. Otherwise it’s easy to get swamped!

Stumble it!

David has been busy!

He has just announced two new tools that are going to make a big difference to the blogging community in East Lothian: a Grazr feed reader of all exc-el blogs and a widget that lists the latest posts from all exc-el blogs.  These two tools open up exc-el in a dramatic way.  Before them, it was not possible for a casual browser to see a list of all the exc-el blogs, nor to get a handle on what the current activity was.  Congratulations to David, and to Ewan who has, I think, been working with him on this stuff.

Stumble it!

Our annual S2 ski trip to Courmayeur in Italy departs from the high school at 9.30 am on Saturday morning in 4 coaches, with 149 people including the adults.

I’m the party leader!

Whilst I’ve been trying to keep a hand in on-line this week  (with disasterous consequences in one case) I’ve reached the point where I really need to get off the computer and concentrate on the task at hand.

Expect radio silence from me until I get back on Sunday 28th January, and wish me luck!

Stumble it!

John Johnston has just announced  a “competition” to design the logo for the new ScotEduBlogs.org.uk Web site.

I put competition in quotes because the prize is just a big bucket of kudos and the appearance of your logo on the site!
If you can think of someone with an artistic bent that might be able to help (a pupil perhaps?), please pass this on to them.

Stumble it!