The past few periods in block H have been spent customizing a few teacher blogs and creating a system that allows student syndicated content to become part of a teacher blog. There are more teachers beginning to use our internal wordpressmu install and many are interested in adding student content to their blog. Both of the blogs I mention below begin with the student creating content on their own personal blog. Once the post is created RSS feeds and Feedwordpress are used to add the content to the teachers’ blog. I thought I would start outlining the steps needed to create a blog that aggregates other content in it.
I am creating this post with ScreenStep. This software makes it easy to organize a tutorial and to add graphics to the tutorial. You can also add video to the tutorials. I had some trouble adding a video embed from Vimeo that I created using Screenflow. Since I use the Viper Video Quicktags plugin I can add the Quick tag code as text and the video I want is added to this post/lesson.
Blog One: This blog will be used to collect students math reflections. The students have all been added to the blogs and soon the explorations that have been created will result in reflective blog posts. This teacher is doing some really interesting things with Mathematica. So if you are interested download Mathematica player and check out what the is doing
Blog Two:This teacher is creating a Spanish Magazine. Each student is required to create a spanish blogpost on their won blog. Then the content is syndicated to the teacher blog and using category matching the content is used to create a Spanish Emagazine. We are still at the initial phase with the blog but I think it will end up being an interesting site.
Tutorial
Get Plugins
Find activate and install the plugins above.
1. allows you to create personalized information for the syndicated blog posts.
2. allows you to create a sidebar based link that adds a blog to the list of syndicated blogs.
3. allows for flexibility in displaying links.
4. allows for flexibility in the creation of categories.
6. allows other blog posts to be syndicated within your blog
Setup Feedwordpress
Once the feedwordpress plugin has been enabled you will see the syndication area available on your sidebar.
Syndication
Feeds and Updates
The settings I have.
Posts and Links
I leave everything here at their default values. Since I also have the “Add Attribution for Feed WordPress” plugin enabled I add an attribution template for all of the blogs.
Remaining Options
Except for Categories and Tags I leave all remaining options to their default values.
In category and tags I select the option of don’t create new categories or tags and don’t syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar category.
Categories
Student blogs are setup with a one to one matching category in the teacher blog. This way only matching category posts are syndicated and the teacher receives only the content related to their course. In the Spanish blog, for example, when a student wants to add a post to the Spanish Newspaper they write the post in their personal blog then select a category that exists in both blogs, Deportes, for example and Feedwordpress would automatically add the student content.
