A little less than a semester on our blogs and over 5000 posts. Over 3000 graphics, embedded presentations, video and more. Three portfolio trials by three different teachers (in the past it has been just me.) A group of twenty teachers learning about portfolio creation over a series of PD sessions. We are getting there and next year will be a good one.

teachNbabble - just a place to babble

This is cool and will impact the way we handle portfolios next year. After getting a tweet from @chamada I realized I missed the big picture with GDrive. I had tried to embed a podcast in mp3 format and when I found no embed code I stopped. But his tweet made me look at things again.

@urkomasse @zomoco @gbertoia @DavidCollett You can upload video to GDrive and embed from there.

This means that I can embed a large variety of filetypes just by uploading to gdrive and using the embed code for the file.

I have tried a PDF, MOV, svg, and a pages document. To me it looks like you can embed any filetype supported by Google Docs Viewer this will make the artifact collection part of our student portfolios a lot more streamlined.

PDF

MP3
No Embed

Video

svg graphic

pages document embed

teachNbabble - just a place to babble

Interesting visualization.

teachNbabble - just a place to babble

This has been a long week. It started with news of the death of our director and each day brought a new situation and memory. The day we found out. The next day when kids were told (although it was out on Facebook according to my son the same day as we found out…no surprise there). Questions from kids. The athletics banquet.

via XKCD http://xkcd.com/1048/

Today with a cartoon.

As my son said “He is a real nice guy. He really cares about us and what we do”.

For me it just reminded me of the things I liked the most about working where I do. A director that always asked about your kids and genuinely was interested in your answer. Not what I have experienced the previous 20 + years overseas.

Dealt with this two years ago with Bill and again this week with Charles. Cancer just plain sucks…..

teachNbabble - just a place to babble

Now that I am almost 100% sure that my role next year will also include some time for helping teachers out I started looking at how the Tips and Hints blog can be more visible. So I started reading about how I could add an RSS feed to our WordPress dashboards.

I read this tip on WordPress Tips  describing how you could add an RSS feed to the dashboard. This worked well but it is theme specific and as we have 100 plus themes this would be a bit of work! Fortunately, the post author also developed a plugin. The plugin Multisite Dashboard Feed Widget allows you to add an RSS feed to the dashboard. With this and the Dashboard Widgets Network Removal plugin our installation looks a lot different.

Will try this for a while to see what people think.

teachNbabble - just a place to babble