Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Student blog examples from drop-in tutorial

In this week's drop-in tutorial:
  • Ladyzulu worked out how to:
    • Copy an essay draft from MS Word into a blog posting - the formatting came through quite nicely - feel free to read and comment (she's the 1st person to publish a blog draft - congratulations! :) ).
    • Create a concept map in MS Word, using the Drawing toolbar, then using PrintScreen and MS Paint to capture and save the image, and then uploading the image into a blog posting - see example concept map. For more info on how to do this, see creating a concept map.
  • Amanda worked out how to:
    • Copy a table from an MS Word document into a blog posting - the formatting came through very well - see example.
    • Embed a video from youtube in a blog posting - see example.
    • Add a photo to one's blogger profile
  • Fiona was keen to embrace the possibilities of online concept mapping using MindMeister. She had already created a concept map for her essay and we then worked out how to embed the map into a blog posting - see example. There are several really appealing features of this approach, e.g.,
    • a detailed, readable map can be presented
    • zoom and scroll
    • nodes can be hyperlinked
    • collaborative maps can be developed
    • free, online

4 comments:

Fi Braybrooks said...

Hi James, I've also come across the fact that when you click and drag the map it links itself to the MindMeister webpage - it wasn't doing that yesterday, so i'm not sure how to fix it! Might have to have another look at the configuration in the edit HTML?

Fiona

Karen Woods said...

A big thanks to Ladyzulu for posting your draft and for James's constructive comments - this gives the rest of us a much better idea on how to construct our blog essays and how to meet the assessment criteria. Certainly answers several questions I was muddling over. Cheers,Karen.

James Neill said...

Fi,
Hmmm...looks like a sneaky little bit of advertising which seems to appear after a while. I just tried posting a fresh concept map and it didn't have the link. I wonder what happens if you put the same embed code in another posting - same thing? If its still there, you could try copying the map and then pasting in the new embed code. But it would probably just provide a temporary workaround.

Kara said...

HI james just thought I'd let you know that I used MS word 2007 to create my concept map. It has a great chart maker function in it. Then I just used the print screen and paint application to get it on my blog.