Matthew_DEngel_Web20

media type="file" key="third_run_of_wordpress_project.swf" width="684" height="513" **//Matthew D. Engel's WEB 2.0 Tutorial!!!//**

Hello and Welcome to My Web2.0 project!!!

I've made a short movie (above) using Jing to help me show you ways to use Wordpress in your class. I've known many English and social studies teachers who use this program to run a web-log for their classes. I am sure that it can be used by teachers of other disciplines as well. Our building level International Baccalaureate Coordinator actually uses hers to make the IB Program students aware of deadlines, community service hours and seminar topics.

There are many advantages to using Wordpress. It allows you to keep in touch with your students even when you are not in school. As long as there is the world-wide web, your classroom can exist in cyberspace. Wordpress can be used in conjunction with multimedia presentation formatting programs like Jing and Slideshare to put traditional notes or powerpoints into a more "eye-catching" format. Wordpress allows a teacher to have conversations with their students and moderate/edit comments for appropriate content (see below).

Once you've logged in as an administrator and are on the dashboard feature page (see below), you really see some neat things. You can make a blogroll (a list of hyperlinked and annotated blogs or web resources that you like), you can download pictures, movies and other files for sharing, you can track your comments, edit them, erase posts entirely, filter spam from your responses and see time and date stamps on nearly everything posted. You can change your background theme too. As a plug-in or add on, I have Askimet which is the spam killer program to help me from getting 4,000,000 viagra advertisements clogging my moderation box.

Some of you may ask, "Why did you choose a topic you already know something about?" Well, unlike presenting rote information that doesn't promote growth, doing this project on Wordpress has been a growing experience for me. First, I had to learn Jing. Once I got the hang of that, I had to figure out how to take a screen capture or movie and post them to this wiki, which by the way is something I messed up last week!!! Looking at Jing, this is going to help me to be able to take movies of the IB Historical Investigations I collect on Turnitin.com as pdf or docx files and edit, highlight and talk about them and send them to students for feedback. I don't see Wordpress as just a blogging tool anymore but an actual multimedia library to enhance at-home learning and off campus communication.

My Wordpress blog page is [|http://henricowarriors.org/engel/]and you can look up everything I spoke of in the tutorial's movie.

Thanks for your time and feel free to email me with any comments or questions. Matt Engel mdengel@henrico.k12.va.us