A new dimension for your posts

Introduction

Finding new ways to make your posts more interesting is always fun and can also help demonstrate employability skills such as those in technology! Here you will find out how to sign up for “Slideshare” and “Prezi” two different ways of adding presentations to your blog. We will also show you how to “embed” these types of presentation in your blog.

Slideshare

“Slideshare” is a simple way of uploading and sharing Powerpoint presentations. So if you already know and use Powerpoint you may want to use this to share your employability skills presentation.

This short screencast gives the steps for signing up to Slideshare. Once you have signed up you are directly in an upload screen. However you will get an email with a link for you to click to confirm your membership. Remember to click this or your account will disappear!

The embedded Slideshare below will show you how to upload and embed a Slideshare

 

Prezi

Prezi is a tool for producing and sharing presentations completely online. The main features are that unlike Powerpoint it is not linear and that it uses a zooming technique to move between items.

Here is a screencast on signing up for Prezi

The short embedded Prezi below will show you how to embed a Prezi. For learning how to use Prezi checkout the help in your Prezi account

Vokis

For making and embedding Vokis see “Lina’s Blog”

Conclusion

We hope you have fun embedding Slideshares or Prezis and Vokis in your blogs. They are a great way of adding an extra dimension.

 

Adding links and uploading files to your post

Introduction

This post is about adding (inserting) links into posts. Linking is one of the most important parts of blog posting. It is a way of letting people get to more information from your post.   You can also use links to show and acknowledge (reference) where you have found information.

Adding a link

Adding a link is very easy. You just need to follow a few simple steps. You will find a useful guide to adding links if you checkout his  link to “How to insert links in your post” from the Edublogs guide. The guide has a short video and also images with text to describe the steps.

You can now include links in any of your posts. It is a good idea to include links to course blog posts that you have used to help you create your own posts.

Uploading files

Later we will look at adding images to your posts. However the first thing we will ask you to add to a post is the second draft of your Learning Plan. So here we will show you how to upload a file that you can open from within your blog.

This “How to upload files” is a screencast. The file that we uploaded in the demonstration is this one Learning Plan Template.

Once you have done your own draft Learning Plan using the template you can upload it by following the steps in the screencast.

Uploading Images

Uploading images is almost the same as uploading files. The differences are:

  • Instead of highlighting the title to link a file you just put your mouse pointer where you want the image and click to position it. You can then follow the screencast to upload the image.
  • Once the image is uploaded you get a different window for managing it, here you just choose where you want it to appear in the width of the page and then click insert.

It is important that you resize and adjust your image as necessary to fit the width of your blog. You can see how to do this in later posts.

Conclusion

Once you have used the information in this post to add a link and also to upload a file leave a comment on this post that answers these questions.

  1. Which set of instructions (“Adding a link” or “Uploading a files”) worked best for you?
  2. Tell us one feature/factor, for each set of instructions, that you found very helpful?

Remember to write proper sentences and to check your spelling before you post the comment.