This was a direct result of our users’ feedback as the ‘primary’ in PrimaryBlogger might have lead people to believe we’re designed only for Primary Schools, when actually PrimaryBlogger is available for all educational institutions. We hope this makes people feel more comfortable and allows PrimaryBlogger to be accessible to every teacher, lecturer and educator.

Polls ¹

You can use these to collect information from your class or to check their understanding of something.

They can either have a choice of two answers:

Or can tick as many answers as they like:

To see the results you just click ‘view results’

In your dashboard you have a polls menu option and in that you can see who has said what by clicking on the log for that question

Maps ²

You can embed Google maps into your blog like you have done with a video, they can be in map or satellite view. The children can swap between views and zoom in and out themselves.

To do this you just need to click the map button when you are creating a post

Then type in a place or postcode then save changes and click insert this map

100 word challenge ³

Each week a 100 word challenge can be posted on your blog, it will include a prompt for writing (e.g. a title, video, picture etc) and then the children just need to use the prompt in whatever way they can to write 100 words. The literacy merit is that they can then comment on each others posts with praise and suggestions to give them a real audience for their writing.

It would be helpful if you show you class how to count how many words they have written in word (by going to the tools menu and clicking word count in version 2003 or just looking in the bottom left hand corner of the screen in 2007) so they don’t try and waste time counting their words themselves.

Multiposting

There’s a new feature on PrimaryBlogger now that allows you to post to all of your blogs at the same time, without having to open each blog and post the same content in each one. It’s called Multipost and it’s on the right hand side of the post editor page where you write your blog posts. All you have to do is click the relavant blogs that you wish to post to.

The Multipost option is a quick way to get pupil opinion on something (e.g. What new books to buy for the library?) which helps tick the Ofsted criteria of PupilVoice.

Firstly, we have now started offering PB Pro accounts to allow you more upload space, premium plugins, premium themes and priority email support. Prices start as low as 83p a month for the 2GB account.Although we’ve started doing paid accounts we don’t want to become a faceless organisation to just take your money, we’re still offering free accounts with lots of features. In fact we haven’t removed anything, we’ve just added more to the PB Pro accounts. We’ve started the PB Pro accounts to help us cover our costs in running the service, we’re growing quite rapidly and our network that runs PB requires us to maintain it.

We hope that if you enjoy PrimaryBlogger and would like to support us then you’ll purchase an account. Keep an eye on our Twitter account in the coming weeks as we’ll be giving away some free PB Pro accounts to lucky winners.

Next, onto the new features!

You might have noticed that “Activate easy mode” button at the top right of your admin screen. Easy blogging is great for pupils and staff to get blogging who don’t need all the other options available, such as plugins and settings. It helps you concentrate on what matters, writing posts. You will also be presented with the option to activate the easy mode or standard mode when you create a new blog. You can always exit easy mode or go back in whenever you like.

We like to have as much information available to help users use PrimaryBlogger more efficiently, so we’ve now got video tutorials which you can find in your admin menu. They explain all the main PrimaryBlogger functions, from writing posts to changing settings. You’ll also notice that each page now has video tutorials for each individual topic in the admin help section, top right – click Video Tutorials.

We’ve added the ability to mass create users and blogs easily, check out “Blog & Users Creator” in the Users section and “Import Users” in the tools section. They’re documented with instructions at the top of each of the plugins, but they’ll make life a lot easier for users who want to add other users or blogs in bulk.

We’ve added lots more plugins and themes, even more if you purchase a PB Pro account. Check out the plugins and themes sections of the admin area to see what we’ve added!

We’ve merged our Ask, Wiki and Support websites into one, you can now get support for all Primary Technology services from http://support.primaryt.co.uk. We’ve got a lot of support articles on there for PrimaryBlogger, so if you ever get stuck go have a look. Many of you have found this already, but if not we’ve tried to make it as user friendly as possible allowing you to get your problems or questions answered quickly. We’ve also just added a feedback button to the admin area where you can request new features or suggest ideas on how we can move PrimaryBlogger forward. Don’t forget we’re on Twitter too @PrimaryBlogger and we’re usually hovering about to answer your questions or have a chat.

We will soon be announcing the ability to create customised school websites with PrimaryBlogger. We’re envisioning that you will be able to purchase a school websites account, the same way you would with a PB Pro account, then you’d have access to special themes that would allow you to massively customise to your needs. You’d also be able to assign your own domain name to your site and host it on PB, allowing you to use all your blog users on your school website. Imagine being able to get rid of your VLE and using PrimaryBlogger instead, wouldn’t that be much simpler? It would also be a lot cheaper, pricing has not been announced yet but compared to other school website and VLE products out there, let’s just say we’ll be beating them on price by far

Finally, stability. Over the last 6-12 months we’ve been working to stablise PrimaryBlogger, we won’t lie, we’ve had some issues but they’re now sorted. Due to our rapid growth we’ve had to do some massive modifications to our infrastructure that runs PrimaryBlogger. We now have 2 excellent servers that we balance PrimaryBlogger between, optimising page load times so you don’t have to wait around when saving posts and settings etc. I won’t go into much detail but if you’re interested in our set up let us know, we like to share We’ll just say it’s now much more reliable and way faster than we’ve ever been, so enjoy!

Sorry for the long post, but we’ve added a lot of new stuff!

Next, create a new text widget in Apperance -> Widgets in the wp-admin area. Give it a title, something like “Translation”, but you can call it whatever you like. Then paste in the code given from the Google Translation service. Here is an example of the code you can use…..

You can read the rest of this guide at Primary Technology Support

Here are the highlights:

• Easier Uploading
  • File Type Detection – A single upload button
  • Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

• Dashboard Design
  • New Toolbar in the dashboard, combining the Admin Bar and admin header
  • Responsive design for some screens, including iPad/tablet support
  • Flyout menus, providing single-click access to any screen
• New User Experience
  • New feature pointers, helping users navigate new features
  • Post-update About screen
  • Dashboard welcome area for new installs
• Content Tools
  • Better co-editing that releases post locks immediately
  • Don’t lose widgets when switching themes
  • Tumblr Importer
• Under the Hood improvements
  • Use the postname permalink structure without a performance penalty
  • Improved Editor API
  • is_main_query() function and WP_Query method
  • Remove a number of funky characters from post slugs
  • jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16
  • A new Screen API for adding help documentation and adapting to screen contexts
  • Improved metadata API
• Performance improvements and hundreds of bug fixes

Taken from http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.3

We’ve added some new themes and plugins, so here’s what we’ve got for you:

Blue Christmas

Mistletoe

Santa Details

We’ve also added the Snow Storm plugin that you can enable from the plugins area. This will add a falling snow effect to your blog. Once enabled you can change the settings in Appearance > Snowstorm, such as snowflake size, speed and heaviness. Give it a go!

Why not write some Christmas themed blog posts and share them with others using the great Quadblogging service? With Quadblogging you blog with 3 other schools, allowing your pupils blog posts to gain visibility, comments and maybe new friends! Go check it out.

Merry Christmas from the Primary Technology team!

This month we’ve concentrated on cleaning, tidying and optimising rather than adding lots of new features. The downside is there isn’t much to report with new plugins and themes, but the upside is PrimaryBlogger is now faster and more stable than ever!

We’ve made some of our many plugins enabled by default so you don’t have to do anything to enjoy more functionality. We’ve enabled the Members plugin, which allows you to easily create new roles for your users and make pages, posts, forums and all other content restricted to any or as many user groups you like. These new features are available from the Users settings section in the wp-admin area. As another bonus privacy feature we’ve enabled the More Privacy Options plugin, which allows you to password protect your blog, allow only blog members to view content or make your blog visible to only blog administrators. You can view these new options in your wp-admin area under Settings > Privacy.

Some more great news, we’ll soon be creating lots of easy to follow guides for how to make the most of PrimaryBlogger. Guides listing details of how to view stats on your blog with Google Analytics, moving your comments to Disqus – enabling a more social experience on your blog and guides on how to use our many other plugins, so keep an eye out for those on this blog or on our Twitter account @PrimaryBlogger.

We’ve cut down spam massively by adding a new layer of protection in the form of the Akismet plugin, you might see it’s name pop up in the wp-admin area if you look closely. You don’t have to do anything with it, it just protects you from spam automatically making moderating your blogs even easier!

Finally we will soon be phasing a lot of our older themes out and replacing them with far more appealing ones, that you and your pupils will love. This is due to the software we use is always adding new features and some themes stop working with updates, we want your experience to be without flaws so this is to make sure you are up and running 100% of the time. We will email you if your blog is going to be affected and give you some time to change them. More information on this soon.

So that’s it for this months instalment. If you have any feedback, let us know in the comments or give us a shout on Twitter @PrimaryBlogger.

P.S. Want to be featured on our home page at http://primaryblogger.co.uk? Send us a link to your PrimaryBlogger blog and your school logo and we’ll get you up there!

Every month we’re going to detail all new plugins and themes that we install for you, and any other great product updates that we have to give to you. So here goes…

Themes

Pink Touch 2

Pink Touch 2 has a stellar mix of color, texture, and typography. It pays close attention to detail. The individual design effects are simple and subtle but together they make your blog look very attractive.

http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/pink-touch-2/

Platform

Platform is an drag-and-drop theme-design framework for WordPress and HTML5. It will help you do amazing things with your site, faster & easier than ever before.

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/platform

thetalkingfowl

A semantic, HTML5 minimal template with plugin-free flickr and twitter feed.

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/thetalkingfowl

Plugins

WP-Facebook-Timeline

Creates a visual linear timeline representation from your WordPress posts and other media sources in the style of Facebook Profile Timeline. Timeline events can be filtered by taxonomy terms and post types, including custom taxonomies and post types enabled by your active theme.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-facebook-timeline-mf-timeline/

Delete Yourself

A plugin to allow users to delete there own accounts completely from PrimaryBlogger.

PrimaryBlogger home-made

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

Remove Dashboard Access for Non-Admins 

This plugin completely removes non-admin user access to the Dashboard. Non-admins are automatically redirected the site’s homepage. This is great if you just want pupils to be registered so you can have a private blog but want them to have no distractions.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/remove-dashboard-access-for-non-admins/

Embedly

The Embedly plugin allows bloggers to embed videos, images and rich media from “any” source with just the URL. It uses the Embedly API to get the embed code and display it in a post.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embedly/

What else has changed?

You may have noticed we’ve given the main PrimaryBlogger website and service in general a huge overhaul, making it fantastically easy to use. We will be making other small changes soon, so keep an eye out for those.

We need your school logo and PrimaryBlogger blog address so we can feature you on our homepage! Follow us on Twitter and send us a tweet with your info and we’ll see what we can do.

Along with adding all the great new themes and plugins, which we will continue to do, we have also removed the ones that aren’t used to make the plugins and themes area much tidier for you.

Over the next few months we will replace all the more undesirable themes with more appealing ones to make your blogs a more desirable place to be.

We’ve lowered the maximum file size upload to 25MB per file. This is enough for small videos and audio, and many other media formats that we support.

The User Roles plugin is now enabled by default on all blogs. This plugin gives you access to create private blog posts/pages and limit users abilities to view them unless logged in, along with many other amazing features.

What’s changing soon?

We’ll soon be creating an per-blog file space limit of 1GB. This limit will help us keep providing a free service and also help keep PrimaryBlogger fast. If you run out of space make sure to upload your media files to external sites and link it to your blog with the Embedly plugin we enabled this month.

In the coming months we will be looking to provide a professional version of PrimaryBlogger with some premium themes and plugins, along with more file space and other extras. We’ll have more about this exciting news in the coming months.

I’ve found a problem, what can I do?

It’s super easy to get help or contact us. We currently have our support community at http://ask.primaryt.co.uk, there’s our support wiki at http://wiki.primaryt.co.uk, you can contact us on Twitter @PrimaryBlogger and coming soon, we’ll have a brand new support area that will incorporate support for all Primary Technology’s services.