2011 Blended Learning Blog Update
A new year, and I have finally made a couple of things happen that had been in the pipeline for a while… I made my first ‘webcam’ video, see above, and applied a new ‘theme’ to the Blended Learning blog to not only make it look more up-to-date, but give better functionality… let me know what you think!
So, to reach the page above (which displays the most recent blog entry, so will change depending upon the latest story), click on http://wblb.wordpress.com, and you will be within this blog!! Most of the content is produced as ‘blog posts’, so material published on the date to which it is relevant! There are also a number of pages at the top of the site. About gives more information about the site and it’s purpose, Quick Links gives links to the entries that I refer to others most often. Workshops gives information on the year’s workshops as planned (and is the place to check that the date hasn’t been changed, etc.), with Events for bigger ‘one off’ events and external speakers. Recommended Reads are where we will start to build a series of reviews of appropriate materials from books, websites, conferences, etc. On the right hand menu, there’s a “logo” for Blended Learning, a link to a Welcome video, and the opportunity to ‘search’ for materials on the site (use any string of words, but if you’re looking for “a particular phrase” place it within quote marks).
Down the right hand side is a list of Categories (which we will try and keep succinct) . Clicking on any of these will provide a list of headlines for each of the pages within that category. Clicking on any of those headlines will take you to that specific blog entry. Tags are a ‘looser’ entity, but the more that a tag is used, the larger that it will appear. Clicking on any of the tags will also provide a list of headlines. Below the tags there is an option to sign up to receive an email each time that a new blog entry is added.
With the new theme, we have gained extra functionality at the base of the page. These areas are really very clearly titled. Videos are linked from ‘VodPod‘ (which allows you to draw videos from multiple platforms), with the most recent showing first (these are a mix of ‘favourited videos’, and Blended Learning ‘productions’). The latest Twitter entries show in the next column, and clicking on ‘Follow @blwinch on Twitter’ will take you to the account in Twitter itself. The list of recommended blogs are a great selection of materials from other e-learning specialists. To access stories from previous times, either use the search function, or browse through the archives.
Hope you enjoy it, feel inspired to contribute, and let me know if any of it’s not clear!!
