Using the blog

Leicester geography blog can be used by teachers in three ways, to read, interact or contribute.

To read…

Visit the website and read it!

To interact…

Joining this blog is simple. Follow this link http://wordpress.com/signup/ to register yourself on WordPress.com. You’ll be offered the choice of a new blog or just a user name. Choose a suitable user name (you can edit how this appears on the blog later) and complete the rest of the details. You’ll be sent a password to go with your user name, and this can be used to log in to admin area. Once you have a username you will be able to interact with other geography teachers across Leicester by posting comments on the various blog entries.

To contribute…

The real aim of the Leicester geography blog is to provide a space for us to contribute our ideas, share resources and network. Email simon at Soar Valley to request authoring rights. This will allow you to create and edit your own posts. Initially it can be a bit daunting to publish online, but do have a go. You can’t break anything!

On logging into the site as an Author, you should see a blue administration bar appearing in the top of your screen. Click “New Post” to publish something new. As an Author you can make any changes to this post or delete it, so just have a go. Choose categories from the left of the Admin area to add the post to. If you think there is a category missing, let us know and we’ll add it!

After joining this blog and getting a feel for how it works, why not set one up for your own students / department and share your experiences? If there is any support you need to do this, just drop simon an email.

You can’t upload any files other than images to the Leicester geography blog, so the solution is to use a free file sharing service. I recommend 4shared .com or divshare

It’s free and you can store 5Gb worth of data online. If you want to share a file, it’s a simple matter of uploading it to 4shared or divshare, then creating a new post (or comment) with a link to the uploaded file so others can download it.

In this way we can all share files. Just remember this is a public blog and the upload links can be seen by anyone, so don’t upload anything you’re not happy to make public.

What the hell is an RSS feed?

You think this blog could be useful, but you don’t want to keep returning to this page in the hope that something new has been published. The answer is to let updates come to you, rather than the other way round. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) provides a neat solution that could really work for you.

By clicking the link entitled “Subscribe to Leicester Geography by Email” you can enter your email address and automatically receive an email every time there is a new post published on our blog. Simple but effective!

If there is anything you are unsure about, do drop me a line.Using a blog might seem exceptionally complicated at first, but once you get going it is very straight forward. Any questions, do let us know! Big thanks to Noel Jenkins for allowing us to pillage his new user posts on the Somerset Teachers blog!