Video Tutorial: Adding and centering sidebar buttons

I've had several requests to go over how to add buttons to a sidebar, as well as how to center those buttons. This quick video will show you how to do that:

10

Video Tutorial: Numbering Comments!

And do you know what that means?? A quick and easy way to find the winner of your next giveaway!

And it's really easy too...way easier than some of the things we have tried together on the previous videos. All you will need to do is download this Word document and watch the video below...

57

Video Tutorial: Adding flair to your comments link

Have you ever had a hard time finding the place to comment on a blog...even on your own? It's sometimes hard to see that tiny little comment link, what with the post itself, documents, images, labels, and so on.

After you watch this tutorial today, you will be able to create some flair to add to your comments link...hopefully attracting more attention and, well, comments! Here is a sample of the end result:

24

Leaving direct links in comments

I know I have written about this before, but I did find some new code yesterday to make your link look italicized (in addition to the bold)!

It really makes the link stand out even more! See the sample below...

108

My first video tutorial! (Sidebar & Date Fonts)

Eeek! I can't believe I got this to work, but I made a quick video tutorial on changing sidebar titles and fonts!


I would love to hear your thoughts if you get the chance. I'm thinking of redoing my other tutorials as videos. Would anyone be interested in that? Thanks so much for checking it out! :)

25

A few changes in my look...

Before...

and After...

Ok, they're really minor but I wanted to refine some things! :)

10

Gold award stickers (for student-published books)

Our school-wide literacy celebration takes place next week and my students are putting the finishing touches on several projects.

The biggest one of all is a student-created (and published) book. They have illustrated, written, edited, typed, and retyped their books. They are so proud!



Last year, I made some gold stickers to put on the students' books as a surprise, the night of the literary event. They loved them! It was the first thing they exclaimed over...and this is 5th grade!

3

Extending the Reading Log

I've been using Reading Logs to track books read at home this year. But now that my ELL students are more fluent and able to write more, I've wanted something a bit different, with more accountability!

I was inspired to do this kind of summary sheet by the many different forms shared on Proteacher.

I tried to make one that would not be too overwhelming for my newer ELL students (my more fluent students complete an additional weekly Reader's Response at home as well).

12

Getting rid of a gray box on your blog!

You know, the one that shows up when you click your labels: "Showing newest posts with label...Show older posts".



Since I'm always trying to find ways to make my blog look more website-y, I had to remove it!

2

Jena Snowden's Techy Linky Party!

What a cool idea for a linky party! You must stop by and check it out! Thanks so much Miss Snowden! :)

My link is an older post about the iPEVO document camera. Cheap, cute, and so easy to use: Neat little (cheap!!) document camera

2

Social networking on your blog

As if you weren't on your computer enough blogging, there's a whole other facet to a blogging addiction--social networking!

Of course, your followers can catch your updates quickly through Blogger. But with so many people on Facebook and Twitter, this is another way to share your updates and reach more readers quickly.

I know most people are familiar with setting up a Facebook. Mine is set up as a separate public page, rather than a private one. I merged my two blogs into one name there and post updates for both.

So, right after I post something here on my teacher files blog, I head over to my Facebook and copy and paste the URL of my latest post--that's it!

4

Centering and spacing images in your sidebar

If you are someone who likes to collect lots of images and buttons in your sidebar, you might find that some images were made to be centered, while others are not.

There are a couple of quick and easy ways to neaten up those sidebar images.

To center images only takes a bit of code:

You can choose to center each individual image with this. Or you can put all of your images in one HTML widget and center them all at once, by adding the centering code to the beginning and end, with all of those image codes in between.

6