Linda Hartley’s award winning Classroom Displays Blog has moved from the Usefulwiki domain over to its own domain at http://classroomdisplays.org.uk/
Please adjust any links on sites that you maintain so that they point to the new web address classroomdisplays dot org dot uk thanks.
A list of new pages added to the UsefulWiki this year so far…
Linda has set up a new page on the Useful wiki about Improving Fine Motor Skills, which is a concern for Teaching Assistants working with children who aren’t making enough progress to be able to hold a pen or pencil properly at the appropriate age, often boys.
Improving Fine Motor Skills
I just wanted to point out the most popular page on the Useful Wiki by far at present which is the High Frequency Words List by Year . That must be a very useful resource for educators who are planning on using high frequency words for phonics and spelling checks. Then after the Main Page, the next most frequently accessed has been the Teaching Assistant -skills and qualities page. With the change in government during this year there has been a lot of interest in the role of Teaching Assistants, though nobody can be sure which way it will go in the proposed education cuts.
High Frequency Word lists
Happy New Year for 2010 from Useful Wiki and the Usefulwiki Blog.
In 2009 we moved from generic hosting to a local UK host and we’re pleased with that move so far. The theatre breaks blog is running much more smoothly under the hood.
I’ve no idea what 2010 holds for us, but it’s going to be fun!
We’re covering some new topics on the London Theatre Breaks blog now and I thought it might be good to highlight some of key posts in a table here.
A couple of weeks ago we changed the theme on the London Theatre Breaks blog from the old Regulus which served us well for a couple of years but is now looking out dated, which frankly it is. We chose a variant of the magazine theme Mimbo which seems to suit the type of content we publish about West End theatre breaks, and makes use of of thumbnail pictures in the extracts for navigation. At the same time we abandoned the practice of having the blog on a different page to the home page, losing the static front page. There are pros and cons to this decision so we’ll have to see how it works out in tandem with other changes to the way the blog works in the light of fluctuating conditions in the market.
The other thing that has been implemented is the Contents list on category pages, which we hope will aid navigation within the topics for each show for visitors. This has been acheived using a specially commissioned WordPress plugin, small but effective. The idea is that when a visitor arrives at the blog, probably through organic search which throws up the URL and page for the category page in the search results, then the list of contents published at the top of the category page, a list of clickable links, will enable the visitor to quickly navigate to one of the articles which most closely matches what they are really interested in. This method has been tested already on the DARnet blog where it seems to be working OK and has also been extended to the TAG pages. The downside might be that severeal different ways of arriving at the same content might be presented to search engines but the feeeling these days is that this won’t actually do any harm as long as it helps the visitor to get access to the information they are looking for.
The Mimbo theme uses an image manipulation script called Tim Thumb that has been known to cause problems with some web hosts, depending on how paranoid they are at configuring their own settings. It takes the image which has already been uploaded to a subdirectory within the wordpress installation and then creates alternative sized versions of the image for use in thumbnails pictures on the home page , and also on the category and tag pages depending on which template is enabled.
I don’t know why but the new Magazine theme at Theatre Breaks Magazine is displaying some text in the font Comic Sans for some reason. That’s not really an appropriate font for a magazine style, but it’s only happening with some combinations of browsers and computers.
I hadn’t noticed that the blog here still said 2.8.1 whereas in reality we are now of course on 2.8.4, the latest secure WordPress release for all blogs. Mediawiki needs upgrading next perhaps, then we can get the latest plugins working to add functionality to the Useful Wiki
Minor upgrade to WordPress 2.8.1 being rolled out to all blogs.