Using NUS Module Blogs : Cool Stuff

Attack of the Animal Behaviour Students!

Kenneth Gerard PINTO — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:35:00 GMT

In a first for NUS Module Blogs, students of LSM1303 Animal Behaviour are posting their assignments to a student blog. They have flooded the home page with their posts, highlighting the peculiar, wondrous and sometimes human-like behaviour of our animal friends.

The students' brief is to highlight interesting content about animal behaviour in a lively manner, suitable for the person-on-the-street. This can be a challenge as the students have to get the attention of the readers without dumbing down or distorting facts.

Get wild at the LSM1303 students' blog.

Blogging using a desktop blogging client

Kenneth Gerard PINTO — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:33:00 GMT

If you do not want to use the online interface to blog, you might want to consider blogging using a desktop blogging client or desktop blogging software.

Why would you want to do this? Using a desktop client offers several advantages:

If you manage multiple blogs on different platforms, a desktop client allows you to manage everything from a single place.
Posting to blogs from a desktop client is generally faster.
Cross-posting content to several blogs is easier.
You won't lose a draft in progress due to an accidentally closed window/tab or sudden loss of connection.
You can save offline drafts and publish whenever you have internet access.
Some clients allow post backups.

The catch? A lot of the better desktop blogging clients are not free. Still, there are edubloggers like Siva who cannot live without it!

A few desktop blogging clients
Ecto Mac/Win
MarsEdit Mac
Qumana Mac/Win (Free)
w.bloggar Win (Free)

Using the Ecology and Environmental Processes module blog as an example, I've illustrated the settings which will work for MarsEdit. Replace the Name, Home URL and Blog ID to match your module blog, if you want to try this out. As preferences in desktop blogging clients are described differently, you'll have to use a variation of the settings below for the other software listed above.

Settings (MarsEdit)
Name Ecology and Environmental Processes
Home URL http://moduleblog.nus.edu.sg/blogs/lsm3251/default.aspx
Software Other Metaweblog-compatible
RPC URL http://moduleblog.nus.edu.sg/blogs/metablog.ashx
Blog ID lsm3251

Embedding Google Videos in blog posts

Kenneth Gerard PINTO — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 04:15:00 GMT

Recently, there have been links to Google Videos in blog posts on Happiness and Dictionaries.

Instead of linking to the videos, you can embed them directly in your blog posts. However, Google Videos does not make this feature very obvious. Here's how you can embed videos in your blog posts.

Navigate to the video you want to embed.
From the video page, click .
Then click the Embed HTML link. Copy the code (click in the text field, Ctrl-A, then Ctrl-C).

In the Write a Blog Post or Edit Post page, make sure you are in the HTML edit mode (bottom right of the text field). Then paste (Ctrl-V) the code you copied.

Publish it, and you should be able to see the video embedded in your post.

It's always a good idea to provide the direct link to the video in the post as the embed might not turn up in feed readers.

You can also embed YouTube videos in your presentations.

Mashable's PDF Toolbox

Kenneth Gerard PINTO — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:27:00 GMT

Mashable posted a very nice annotated compilation of PDF tools.

I use one tool that's not mentioned in the list: PDF X-Change Viewer. It loads fast, as touted. It also allows me to type into PDF forms meant for printing. Handy!

WikiMindMap

Kenneth Gerard PINTO — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:07:00 GMT

WikiMindMap makes use of Wikipedia to generate a mind map of the search term. I've used Changi as an example in the screenshot above. Students shouldn't be using Wikipedia as a primary source. Nevertheless, that doesn't detract from WikiMindMap's nice way of displaying the entry's related terms.

Click on the words on the branches to go to the actual Wikipedia entry. Click the 'recycle' logo to bring that term to the center of the mind map.

Hat tip to Ewan McIntosh.

Technorati Tags: wiki, mind map