Blog Calendars this Spring

Though ACU Blogs has seen several additions over the holiday break, much of the work by Web Integration and Programming focused on server updates to keep WordPress blogs humming along. Since our launch in 2009, faculty and staff at ACU have created more than 1,000 blogs and those numbers will continue to grow in 2011.

One important holiday update improved the Google Class Calendar system in a several key ways. Most importantly, faculty can now edit every event on a class calendar from one screen (see part #2 of the podcast below).

The following three-part podcast walks you through 3 ways to get course calendars into your WordPress blog.

#1 – Copy and Paste a Reading Schedule from Word (3 min)

We’ll start with the easy stuff, but if you already have a reading schedule typed up at the end of your syllabus, copy and paste may be all you need.

Click to play

#2 – MyACU Calendar Editing Tool (2 min)

One tool that will make working with Google Class Calendars much easier this spring is the new calendar editing tool in MyACU.

#3 – ICS Calendar Plugin for WordPress (7 min)

The new plugin that really brings your Google Calendar into your blog is ICS Calendar. This podcast breaks the process of embedding a calendar into your blog down into easy to follow steps.

Click to play

Other Holiday Additions

Here are a few of the other plugins and projects that were tested and installed over the break. Please continue to send along suggestions for future updates.

• FeedWordPress is a plugin that brings in content from any blog with an RSS feed and aggregates it on a single blog (see example at Feminist Blogs hub). Colleagues at the University of Mary Washington have been using it to create “mother blogs” where students each create their own blogs but share their feeds back to a central class blog that consolidates dozens of external discussions.
• WP LaTeX is a plugin to help get math formulas and equations into blog posts and comments. Here are a couple examples to see how LaTeX turns code into formulas presented as small images.