WordPress

I spent this past weekend reading William Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of new (to me) information presented in the book. While I consider myself very competent in Moodle, to the level of actually teaching a course titled Using Your Moodle, I was happy to learn a few new tips and techniques for getting even more out of the program.

This book isn’t for those new to Moodle, as at least basic skill level is assumed by the author. For absolute beginners, Rices’ Moodle: E-learning Course Development is a decent primer. Of course, any open-source software book is going to be a bit out-of-date fairly quickly, but both of Rice’s books manage to be very relevant even as Moodle progresses through versions. Another option for those new to Moodle is the free Using Moodle e-book by Jason Cole and Helen Foster - this is a great resource.

If you’re interested in learning and sharing even MORE about Moodle, I created a Moodlers group on Diigo a while back - it’s open for anyone to join. We share links and have discussions, it’s a great resource! Also, slightly off-topic, but I recently started a WordPress Diigo group - although there are several other WP groups on Diigo, I wanted this one to focus on self-hosted, but also include resources for Edublogs and Wordpress.com as well. Plugins, themes, how-to’s - I’m hoping to get this group going a bit more. It’s pretty new and I haven’t publicized it much, so feel free to join and tell your friends!

Next up on my reading list is a book I’ve had on my shelf for a few months now - Discussion-Based Online Teaching To Enhance Student Learning by Tisha Bender. This looks to be fairly heavy reading, so I’m planning on wading in and taking it slow - I’ll definitely share my thoughts when I’m done!

Also, I’m considering, but haven’t found the funding for yet, doing the coursework at University of Wisconsin - Stout for the E-learning and Online Teaching Certificate. This 15-credit graduate course of study is all graduate credits, but unfortunately wouldn’t tie in to the grad program I’ve decided on (more on that later). So, approximately $5,000 extra for something that would surely be interesting and useful, perhaps career-advancing, but definitely EXTRA. Lots to think about!

Any other Moodle or online teaching/learning reading suggestions? I’d love to hear them!

We had a makeover! Just wanted to share my excitement about the new look over on This Mommy Gig (we kept the sexy mama legs based on the majority opinion that they rock) - things are really coming along and it’s been SO much fun writing with the amazing women who have joined Stephanie, Christine, and me. Head on over there to see the new design in full glory that I contracted through Rachael Cahours Acklin - one of the writers on This Mommy Gig and owner of Caffeinated Design. Rachael also designed the TMG button over on the sidebar here. She did 3 different colors for us - if you’re interested in supporting us and putting one on your site, just let me know!

Geek Note: I’m now in love with the WordPress plugin that everyone else in the world has been using for a LONG time. It’s called What Would Seth Godin Do and is the plugin that makes that little box display at the top or bottom of posts with a static message of your choice. I’m also having fun learning about and experimenting with Google Adsense over on This Mommy Gig. I know that it’s not a popular subject here, but if you’re interested in talking about advertising and affiliates, just let me know - I’ve been doing a TON of research on it for TMG and my clients……………

I’ve been digging deeper and deeper in WordPress on the various sites I’m working on (just starting to work with Adsense on one of them - very interesting) and there are 2 plugins that make my life so much easier that I actually have the time to write about them!

The first one is the One-Click Installer (thanks to @wiredpig for telling me I needed it) - this plugin allows you to upload themes or plugins without having to unzip the file and upload via ftp, which can be a major time suck. I love, love, LOVE this plugin! With this, you can upload the themes/plugins directly from your WordPress dashboard. The only thing I’ve found difficult is that sometimes a theme/plugin folder is buried within a subfolder in the zip file (thanks to Taylor for helping me with this!) so in this case, you would have to actually go through the “old-fashioned” way of uploading.

Speaking of ftp and uploading, I’ve started using Filezilla (on recommendation of MANY) and find it incredibly easy to use. The file manager makes it easy to manage the numerous sites I’m working on.

The second favorite is the Automatic Upgrade plugin. This plugin does all of the hard work of upgrading to the newest version of WordPress - I have to admit that I’ve been too scared to try manually upgrading and now haven’t even had to! It’s worked great so far - I’m loving it.

I use many other plugins, but the favorites listed above haven’t saved me quite enough time to sing praises for all of them - you can find a list of them in my diigo bookmarks tagged plugins. All WordPress related resources are in my diigo bookmarks tagged Wordpress.

Also, a great tip from Talia Carbis (which I definitely follow) is to make sure to save all of your themes and plugins in an easy-to-access folder on your computer so you can use them again in another WP installation if needed.

Most of you know that I started out blogging (not all that long ago) on edublogs and I can’t say enough about how wonderful it was to start out there (and I hear they’re upgrading to 2.5 soon, yay!). Now that I’m diving into the deep end of the blogging technical pool, I realize how absolutely impossible it would have been if I wouldn’t have had the chance to test out the waters (sorry for that!) at edublogs, where there were tons of great themes already installed, plugins upon plugins available, an amazing community of educators, and the wonderful technical help of James Farmer and Sue Waters. I moved on because I wanted more flexibility and the ability to fully use my own domain name, but edublogs was the best possible place to start my blogging journey (swim?). I do know many bloggers have also had great success starting out at Blogger - I just wrote my first post on a Blogger blog on Saturday, it was incredibly easy to figure out. I just haven’t had as much time to play there, but I hope to in the future.

I’ve definitely been guilty of neglecting my own site for the sake of other work both in Moodle and WordPress - I need to get back in here and mess around some more with the design soon. If you have any great plugins, themes, or other Wordpress resources for me, PLEASE share here! (I suppose I’ll take Blogger resources as well, for the sake of research…………)

Oh, wait! Can you believe I forgot to tell you who made this new site possible? Jeff O’Hara (yup, the edmodo guy!) VERY generously offered to host my site when I mentioned that I was a bit overwhelmed a while back and didn’t know how to back-up my old blog - he did a lot of the grunt work here so I didn’t have to. Who says we can’t meet great friends online? So, thanks to Jeff for making the move here happen much sooner than it would have otherwise!

I’m in the process of getting set up on my new site powered by self-hosted Wordpress 2.5 - please be patient with me as I transition from Reflection 2.0 at edublogs to Kate Says at katesays.org………..it’ll be worth your wait! I’m working with a REALLY cool theme called WP Remix - if you have any experience with this and want to offer insight/advice, I’d love to hear it!

I moved all of my posts with me, but all links to my older posts within OTHER older posts will take you back to my old blog - I’m going to work on updating them, but for now, bear with me please! If you notice anything broken here, PLEASE let me know! Just throw it in a comment or contact me and fill me in, I’ll be so grateful. Also, I need to move all of my widgets and feeds over as well - it’ll be here soon! Lots of customizing to do, which is one of the reasons I made this move. This is going to be my Wordpress and CSS sandbox - I can’t wait to play here!

Thoughts, theories, all input welcome………..