Monthly Archives: August 2008

Writing Blog Posts On Mobile Devices

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I absolutely love being given challenges. So was totally pleased when Alice Mercer sent me a message in twitter asking how to write blog posts to her Edublogs blog using her mobile phone. Fortunately I had lots of ideas on “how to” but I hadn’t gotten around to testing them.

Posterous.com

My first thought was posterous.com because it can be used with any mobile device provided you can write and send emails.

All you have to do is:

  1. Set up an account at posterous.com
  2. Next link all the accounts you want to post to automatically when you send an email to posterous. For example you can set it to automatically post to your blog, Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr.Image of Setting up Posterous account
  3. Now whenever you write an email on your mobile phone and send it to post.posterous.com the contents of the email are immediately posted to all sites you linked to your posterous account.
  4. Alternatively you can control where it is posted to by altering the email address. For example emails sent to blog@posterous.com will post the contents to your blog while flickr@posterous.com will post to your flickr account.
  5. You can also attach photos, Doc, PDF, mp3, PPT with your text and it will be inserted into your blog post.

Here is a post I wrote using Posterous with a photo attached while I waited for my son to finish guitar practice. Apparently if I had used the correct URL it would have changed them to links — I will have to try that next time. Obviously it can’t add tags or categories so you would need to add these later.

WordPress For iPhone

Now if you have an iPhone or iTouch I would recommend you use WordPress for iPhone which you can download for free from the App Store. This application provides more editing control plus you can add tags and categories to posts. Watch this video to check it out in more detail.

FINAL THOUGHT

There are quite a few tools that you can use for writing and/or creating audio posts using mobile devices. Would love to hear more about the one(s) you’ve tried and whether you liked/disliked using them.

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Can You Help Me Inspire Our Future Teachers?

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Image of person jumpingI’ve been invited to work with second and third year students into their four year Bachelor of Education, Early Childhood and Primary degree. They are currently doing a unit called Using Computers in the Classroom where they will be investigating the use of technology such as blogs, Electronic Whiteboards, Google Document, Google Earth, iPods/MP3, Photo Sharing, SecondLife, Social Bookmarking, Turning Point (clickers), Video Conferencing, Wikis, My Sace/Face Book, YouTube, Podcasts etc.

My role will be to mentor them on blogging and it’s use in education. As part of this I will be sharing posts like:

  1. Share your Blogging Experience and Tips For Educators New To Blogging
  2. Student and Teacher Blogging that Succeeds

However I was thinking this is a great opportunities for us educators to inspire our future teachers.

So can you please share with us:

  • What are the different technologies you use in your classroom?
  • How do you use these technologies with your students and how it has helped them? e.g. Do you have any great stories to inspire them?
  • Can you share some examples of how you use these different technologies with students for them to check out?
  • What are your 3 most important advice to our future teachers?

UPDATE: Oops made a mistake with the link to Share your Blogging Experience and Tips For Educators New To Blogging - this has now been fixed!  Thanks to Brtitt Watwood for letting me know there was a problem.

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Photo by BrittneyBush licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0

Uploading Photos From Digital Cameras Into Blog Posts

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Taking your own photos to use as images in blog posts are an excellent idea. But uploading photos directly from your digital camera directly into your blog posts isn’t!

The photo size our digital cameras produce are:

  • Very large e.g. my 4.0 mega pixel digital camera photos are about 2272 x 1704 pixels and 700 KB in size whereas my 8.0 mega pixel camera are about 3264 x 2448 and 2.4 MB in size
  • Designed for printing good quality photos not for uploading directly into blog posts

Just because any image you upload to your blog is now automatically resized to a maximum width of 500 pixels doesn’t mean you should be uploading your photos directly from your digital camera because:

  1. It takes longer to upload your image
  2. Unnecessarily uses up storage space

What you should be doing is reducing your photo size in both dimensions and file size prior to uploading. I normally reduce the dimension of my photos to 450 pixels wide as this is the ideal image width for my blog theme.

Here are some free programs for reducing photo size which are relatively easy to use:

iPhoto

iPhotos is the program Mac users use for importing, organising, editing and sharing photos. Here are instructions for resizing photos using iPhoto.

Image of irfanview

IrfanView

IrfanView is a free graphic view and image editing program. Check out this information:

  1. To learn how to do basic image editing using irfanView
  2. or Watch this tutorial to see how to resize images using irfanView

Picasa

Picasa is Google’s free software for organizing, editing and sharing images. Here are instructions on resizing your photos using Picasa.

Picture ManagerImage of resizing with Picture manager

Microsoft Picture Manager is a basic image editing and image management program included in the Microsoft Office Suite starting with version 2003.

This is the program I mainly use to reduce my photo sizes since it’s already installed on the computers I’m using and is adequate for what I’m trying to achieve. Here are detailed instructions on how to use Picture Manager.

PIXresizer

PIXresizer is a free image resizing program which you can download from Bluefive Software. Here are the instructions for resizing images using PIXresizer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My goal for this post was to share some simple tools that people can use to reduce digital photo size prior to uploading to blog posts. Please feel free to share any links or information that would help others understand more about resizing/resampling and image quality.

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