For the past five years I have been using Wordpress, either on a local school Mac OSX server, or with Bluehost and Surpass hosting my Wordpress blogs. Never had many problems that I did not cause myself. This year I have been lucky as we have great ICT systems people that make our wordpressmu install simply work.
When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.8 on this blog, however, I started getting a number of the following:
Fatal error:Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhasuted (tried to allocate 7680 bytes)
I could get rid of the error by deactivating plugins but was looking for a solution that allowed me to keep all the plugins I wanted active. I assumed at this point that the issue was with my service provider as anything I googled lead me to information on increasing memory limits using a php.ini file. Noting that the allowed memory size was 32 MB I changed the memory size to 64 MB. I did this in several directories but ended up with the same error.
After adding Wordpress to the search I found, in the customer support area of another provider, that adding define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’,'64′); to the wp-config.php would solve the problem. Sure enough the problem went away.
Reminds me of the flowchart I posted a while back. It’s all out there, I guess you just have to look!
Thanks to @rappino I have been playing with Etherpad. We used it a while back to make more sense of a PD session we were in and the conversation we had using Etherpad made the session much more worthwhile for the both of us.
The other day I tried it out with my grade nine classes as they were thinking about their next project. Etherpad is a lightweight tool and our eight different groups had no problem using the tool simultaneously despite our limited bandwidth. Changes were quick and it felt a lot faster than trying the same type of activity using a Gdoc. Each pad has chat capability something that many of the students, for some strange reason, did not really see until the end of the activity. In addition, the tool has a playback tool that shows how text has been added over time. I included a short video of that below as well.
Using an IFrame you can embed both the completed pad and the live pad in a blog as shown below (I have embedded a read only version)
Definitely a tool worth checking out.
Video of the playback tool – Time Slider
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EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing
“When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone’s screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.”
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Teaching and technology ~ presentations and resources for educators
Presentation and workshop documents
During the last six or so years I have created a number of ‘how-to’ documents and presentations for a variety of web based and related technologies. They are available from the various workshop web pages however I thought it might prove helpful to link to all the documents from a single page. Some of my workshop participants have referred to these documents as ‘cheat sheets’.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
My son was talking about teachers the other day. He was watching a teacher handle a discipline issue in a way he found condescending and mean. He wondered what motivated people like that. He then started reminiscing of teachers he has had over the past 12 years of schooling that fit his criteria of being mean. There were more than I remembered.
This video from E. McIntosh made me think of people, rules and authority.
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“For tips, tricks, and more, visit www.googleguide.com/example_ref.html & Google Guide
Please show this Google cheat sheet to your librarian and others who use Google regularly.
By Nancy Blachman & Tasha Bergson-Michelson, who don’t work for Google. March 2008
Now search for yourself. Do the exercises that are online at www.googleguide.com/exercises_teens.html.” -
“free Firefox extension that helps you google the internet faster”
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“Ambiently semantically connects webpages of similar or related meanings
together. Click the “Ambient Page” bookmarklet on your browser to find
unexpected and useful websites for any webpage you are viewing.” -
Get Involved! – Ideas for Activities
“Promote Media Literacy Week\n\nOrganizations interested in helping spread the message about Media Literacy Week are welcome to participate. Here’s how you can get involved:\n\n * Put a link to the Media Literacy Week site on your intranet or Web site. Visit the Promotional Materials page to find out how.\n * Check out the Articles page to download articles that can be published in trade publications.\n * Sign up for the Media Literacy Week bulletin and promote this great initiative through communications with your employees, clients and organization members. \n\nFor more information on how to participate in Media Literacy Week, contact: mlw@media-awareness.ca.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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Révolution Linux :: Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education
“Here are the various documents available for “Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education” :”
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The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave
“Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that’s notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you’ll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that’s evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave. “
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
There are a number of different ways you can use a wordpress blog in a school. Blogs, for example, can be setup as content management systems, for recording class activities, growth portfolios, photoblogs, to chronicle an activity, to organize groups and to highlight activities in one area of the school.
A common use of a Blog is to extend the classroom creating a space where students can discuss, react, expand, collaborate or even rant. Over the past five years of using wordpress in the classroom I’ve seen three different possibilities when helping a teacher setup a blog for this purpose.
A teacher (T) blog where the teacher published different prompts and had students comment on the prompts. To work with a system like this I usually needed to show the teacher a few basics, such as creating posts, pages and link categories. This is an easy system for a teacher to manage as all they would have to do is read the comments. However, in terms of adding to a students Digital Identity this system does little.
A teacher-author (TA) blog where the teacher or the students could write about whatever they choose. In this system students are given the roles of authors. A little more to do in terms of helping the teacher. There would be a need to show how students with author privileges could be added to the blog, as well, as, looking at different strategies that might be used to read and organize student created posts. As in the previous example, the teacher would have control over theme choice, adding masthead graphics, adding and placing widgets: personalization of the blog.
Again this is an easy system to manage. The teacher, as the blog administrator, controls all aspects of the blog. Students could be assigned to a category so finding what each student was writing would be fairly easy. As authors, students could create their own posts or react to a teacher prompt. With this system a student again would not add a much to their digital identity. Although the student has more independence than the previous system the blog essentially belongs to the teacher.
A student (S) blog where the student has their own blog. The teacher would not have to do anything, in terms of, setting up student accounts. However, more work would need to be done to read student created content. At a minimum level a teacher would need to visit each blog to read student writing. In addition, consideration would have be given to creating a blogroll so that navigation to the students blogs is made easier. With a little more work the teacher could be taught to understand how RSS feeds could be used to aggregate student content. In the end, this system would require more assistance on my part and more work on the part of the teacher. In this system, however, the student controls all aspects of the blog. The blog itself becomes an extension of the student as even personalization of the blog is totally up to the student. In this setup the blog offers a student the opportunity to show a different aspect of their digital identity than might be shown with other online tools the student might be using . The blog also is portable can be taken off of the school system and moved.
As students begin exploring an issue, either self directed or from a teacher prompt, within their blogs I would like them to use a writing/research cycle that includes:
Zotero: as a research management tool
Diigo: as a social bookmarking and highlighting site
Wordpressmu: as the writing/commenting platform
With Zotero students will learn how to use an extremely effective research tool. Zotero makes it quite easy for students to store and create a reference section for links that support and extends their writing. With Diigo students will learn about social bookmarking. Through having each student become part of a collaborative group they would be exposed to the power of social bookmarking. In addition, using Diigo’s highlighting capabilities they can be asked to highlight key ideas and new vocabulary terms they encounter. This is a map of my ideas so far. Blogging Cycle
