DIT hint of the week: Organising your Edublog sites Pt3

Which site is mine?

A recent issue has come up specifically for students that are subscribers on their peers’ blogs that have exactly the same site title.

The below screenshot shows what this looks like:

Organising your sites

In the above example there are several sites called ‘Global Childhoods’ – this can make it difficult to determine site identity.

To solve this problem, login to Edublogs – hover your mouse over My Sites, click on the first site called ‘Global Childhoods’ – you will either see two different viewpoints.  One will show all options for posts/pages, site settings etc.  This means that this is your site because you have all the available options to edit content.  See the below example screenshot:

settings

This will be the view you will see if it’s a site that you created

 

For any sites where you are only a subscriber, you won’t be able to edit these as they belong to another member of your group.  So if you click to view a site where you are a subscriber, it will look similar to the below screenshot: (So you can see that all you can do is view your peers’ site.)

site

So when you have located your own site (see screenshot captioned: This will be the view you will see if it’s a site that you created), go to ‘Settings’ > General.

settings

Change the ‘Site Title’ to include your initials – for example ‘Global Childhoods – JS’

Scroll down the page and ‘Save Changes’

This will mean that the next time you hover your mouse over ‘My Sites’ you will be able to quickly identify your own site.

 

DIT hint of the week: Organising your Edublogs sites Pt 2

As a follow up to the organising your Edublogs sites post from last week, in this post we will look at how you can control the menu for your site using two different methods.

When you first create an Edublog site, you’ll notice that within the posts and pages section there are example posts/pages.  Usually called ‘sample page’ or ‘Hello world’ for example.  I always recommend that these example posts/pages are deleted, unless you have been setup with a specific template that has been tailored to your module.

When you then start creating your blog site, you may want to have a home page, about me, CV, Reflections, Contact.  It really depends on how your tutor would like you to setup the blog and what they require in terms of the pages you need.

All blog sites are setup so that when you create a page, the new page (once published) will automatically appear in the top navigation menu.

Most blogs are also setup so that any post your publish will also automatically appear on your home page.

But what if you find that the navigation order is not what you want, so for example you have a page called ‘placements’ and after this page is your ‘about me’ page, but you want the about me page to show before the placements page?

There are two methods to fix this issue, one is relatively straightforward and the other method involves a little more tweaking.

Method 1

  1. go to the dashboard for the site you wish to edit.  (hover your mouse cursor over ‘My Sites’)
  2. go to ‘Pages’ > click to edit the first page you wish to appear on the menu (this is usually ‘home’, but could be another page).
  3. Look to the right-hand side of the page and in the page attributes section enter ‘1’ in the order box.Page attributes
  4. Repeat the above steps for all your pages in order of preference, so for example if your ‘about me’ page was to come after your ‘home’ page then you’d enter ‘2’ in the order box when editing your ‘about me’ page.

    Please note that you must order every page, otherwise any pages not ordered will have ‘0’ assigned and the pages will not order as you need them to

    Instructions

The other point to mention is that you can’t order posts in the way you can with pages. This is because by their nature posts are more collaborative and most blogs are setup to display most recent posts first on your home page.

Method 2

If you want more control over your menu, for example to add a drop-down menu – you can do this by creating your own menu withing ‘Appearance > Menus’

  1. Go to the appearance > Menus area
  2. Create a new menu (call it main menu)
  3. You will see a layout that looks like the below screenshot.  Here you can see on the left, all your pages – simply check any that you want to add to the menu and click on ‘Add to menu’
  4. You will see your pages appear in your new menu.Menu
  5. You can rearrange your menu items by clicking and dragging the page up or down as above.
  6. Once you are happy with your menu, you should check the ‘Primary Menu’ box and ‘Save Menu’

The good thing about this method is that you can open up your posts and add individual posts to your new menu.  You can then drag those posts and make them appear as a drop-down menu item for any of the above pages.  Useful if you have a set of blog posts covering a different aspect of your blog that you want to highlight.

So just follow the same steps for adding a page, except using posts – but this time you can indent the post underneath a page to create the drop-down menu item, shown as below.

menu 3

menu 4

If you want to find out more about about Edublogs or need help, we have a TEL help site with Edublogs guides available here: https://sites.marjon.ac.uk/elearninghelp/

Watch the below screencast to see how the different methods work.

DIT hint of the week: Organising your Edublog sites

This blog post will show you how you can organise your sites, whether staff or student.

As a member of staff, if you have a class you will see all your students’ blogs as a drop-down list under your ‘My Sites’ area.  This can mean that the drop-down list becomes unwieldy and long.

If you are a student and have had to create blog sites for modules from previous years and have been subscribed into groups for previous work, then your drop-down list may also become long.

To remove old sites from your account, there are several options available.  You can simply hide old sites, this means that if you need to revisit old content for ideas, you still have access to it.  You can also remove old sites from your account and also remove yourself as a user from a site.

Hiding sites from your ‘My Sites’ drop-down list

  1. Login to Edublogs
  2. Click directly onto ‘My Sites’

    my sites

  3. You will be taken to all the pages that you are a user on or have created
  4. To hide any old sites from the drop-down list, simply check the ‘Hide this blog in Admin Bar’ box and it will automatically be hidden from the list.  Go through all your sites until you’ve hidden all the old ones, leaving only the sites you need for your current modules.

    hide your site

Removing sites from your ‘My Sites’ drop-down list

  1. Follow steps 1-3 as above
  2. This time check the box next to the title of the site that you want to remove
  3. Go to the Bulk Actions drop-down menu and select your preferred option, so if you want to delete a site or remove yourself as a user from a site.  Removing yourself as a user from a site is most likely option if you were subscribed to a group activity to see your group’s blogs.

Please note that if you delete a site it will archive it and the original creator of the site will not be able to access it.  The preferred option if you are subscribed to someone else’s blog is to simply hide it from the drop-down list or select the ‘Remove me from selected blogs’ option.