Announcements

NEA Foundation Grants

Administrator — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:20:30 GMT

Aaron Pope from the NEA Foundation asked me to pass on some information regarding the upcoming application deadlines for grants.

Since 1999, the NEA Foundation has awarded close to 2,000 individual grants to educators and teams of educators totaling over $5.9 million.
There are two types: Student Achievement Grants and Learning & Leadership Grants.
Student Achievement grants are $5,000 awards that promote classroom innovation to engage students in critical thinking and to deepen their knowledge of standards-based subject matter.
Learning & Leadership grants are $5,000 awards (for teams of educators) and $2,000 awards (for individuals) that support high-quality professional development opportunities, such as summer institutes, action research, collegial study, lesson study, and mentoring.
Applications are accepted throughout the year and are reviewed three times a year, beginning on February 1, June 1, and October 15. Grants support activities for 12 months from the date of the award.
For more information, visit www.neafoundation.org.

Spam Email Begone!

Administrator — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:15:16 GMT

I am happy to announce that we have added a user verification step to all blog contact forms. We hope this will significantly reduce if not eliminate all automated email spam sent from the TeacherLingo.com contact forms.

Thanks to all of the members that have sent us feedback on the issue. If you continue to receive unwanted email or have any other issues, please feel free to use the Feedback tab.

March Lesson Plan Contest

Administrator — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 04:16:00 GMT

Get those lesson plans ready for your chance to win. During the month of March we will be giving away two $50 gift cards in a drawing to two lucky TeacherLingo.com members. The winners will have their choice of either a $50 Amazon.com gift card or a $50 Barnes & Noble gift card.

We will be posting the details of the contest on the home page during the month of March with a link to enter the drawing. Anyone is eligible to win, so you'll want to tell all your friends so they have a chance to win too.

In preparation for the contest we will have a few site updates that we will need to perform on Friday evening. The site will be unavailable for about an hour for maintenance.

Coming Soon to a Community Near You

Administrator — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 03:41:00 GMT

In the coming days we will be updating the TeacherLingo.com community with a few enhancements that we have been working on. We are very excited about the new features and couldn't wait to tell everyone about them!

These features are a direct response to the feedback we have received over the past several months. We love to hear from everyone and encourage you to submit your feedback so we can improve the community. So keep the comments coming!

The first and largest enhancement will be the new Lesson Plans section where you will be able to submit your favorite lesson plans to share with everyone in the community. Each lesson plan also contains an area for other members to submit their own personal extension ideas so that every lesson becomes a collaborative creation. We have also enabled ratings of all of the lesson plans so members can easily rate them for all of the members to see. There will be a section for the featured lesson of the day, 10 most recent lessons, 10 most popular lessons, and of course a full featured search area. We also have created a widget so you can easily display your lesson plans on your blog.

In an effort to combine the many features of the community with our blogs we have created many new sidebar widgets that allow you to share more with your readers. Almost every section of the sidebar on a blog will be easily configurable in the control panel. We will be adding a new area to allow you to select which widgets you want to display on your blog giving you even more control over the personalization of your blog. The new widgets will include recent posts, most popular posts, recent comments, my lesson plans, my friends, my favorite posts, and my favorite blogs. In the coming months we hope to extend this list to provide even more options.

The last enhancement is one of my personal favorites and is something that I have wanted to change from day one. It is the friends feature. Currently when you choose to add someone as your friend, it is really more a of fan feature in the social networking sense than it is a friends list. The members that you add to your friend list have no idea that you are their friend or want to make that connection in the community. So when we roll out the new friend feature it will be a full friend connection experience similar to those that you would find on Facebook or Friendster or any one of those social networking sites. It will be a great way to make new friends and keep track of your favorite members of the community. When you select a member to add to your friend list, you will send them a personal email invitation to join your friend list. They can click on the link in the email and choose to accept or decline your invitation. You will then receive an email confirmation alerting you that your friends list has been updated. All of your invitations will be visible from the My Profile section. You will also be able to invite real world friends that may not have experienced Teacher Lingo yet. This will be a great way to bring your existing friends to our community and show them what a great time you're having.

One last change that I almost forgot about is our new avatar options. We have created a bank of about 30 or so education related avatars for members to choose if they don't have an image to upload. So I'm hoping to see fewer and fewer silhouette avatars in the future.

We hope to have everything ready in the next week or so as we finish up the last few features and wrap up the testing. So be looking for my friend request to all of you.

New Blog Feature

Administrator — Mon, 21 May 2007 03:21:00 GMT

Today we released a new blog feature called the Teacher Lingo Premium Package.

For those of you that have already created your blog on TeacherLingo.com, you are aware that we offer our blogs for free with over 25 themes to choose from and 10 mb of storage for photos. All of our free themes contain banner and inline ads to help us offset the costs associated with hosting teacher blogs for free. This service and all of our themes that we offer today will continue to be free!

We have created the Premium Package for those users who would like to remove ads from their blog. For a small annual fee of $14.95 you can enjoy an add-free blog. In the future we will be adding new features and possibly increasing the usage and storage limits to subscribers of this package. For now, it entitles you to an ad-free blog and any enhancements that we may build in the future that fit into this subscription level.

We have added a new menu item to the Blog Control Panel called Upgrade Your Blog. From there, you can choose to upgrade to the Premium Package and pay using a PayPal account or major credit card. Your subscription will become active immediately after payment is complete.

In the future, we hope to expand the offering to include a package where you can run your own ads and additional widgets to generate income and personalize your blog. We've already begun putting that together, so stay tuned.

We hope one of the packages will meet your needs. If you have a specific feature you would like to see added, please send us your suggestions using the Feedback tab on the home page.

Missing Comments?

Administrator — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 01:24:00 GMT

Have your comments not been showing up? Has your blog recently had comments set to "Possible Spam" that were from registered members?

This may have been caused by our spam filtering software. We recently added additional filters to protect our community from spam comments. These recent changes may have caused some comments to get flagged as "Possible Spam" and automatically moderated.

Please review the comments posted to your blog that were set to "Possible Spam" and allow any posts that you feel are not spam. Our software will notify you via email when it sets any posts to this status.

Any posts that are deemed to be actual spam, will be set to "Spam" and you will not be notified. You can still review these comments, but we recommend that you do not publish any of them. If you think you have comments flagged as spam that are not truely spam, please let us know and we will review them.

If you experience any other issues or have any questions regarding our spam filtering software please let me know. We are constantly working hard to protect our community from the constant attack of spammers.

New Features Coming Soon!

Administrator — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 16:03:00 GMT

We have spent the last month working on a few new features and are planning on upgrading TeacherLingo.com this weekend. The new features include new navigation, a new look, and additional features to allow you to manage your favorite blogs, blog posts, and even favorite members. The majority of the changes will only apply to TeacherLingo.com and should not affect your personal blogs.

We hope that you will enjoy the new features and are looking forward to receiving feedback from you. Below I have included a few snapshots of the new features. Please feel free to post any questions or comments. The new navigation will also include a new tab for Feedback and we are hoping that everyone will use it to provide us with valuable feedback so we can continue to improve and grow our teacher community.

Many areas of the site now have an icon which will pop up a window with the members information and links to connect with them.

The icons next to the blog names also pop up a window with links to favorite the blog or the blog post.

The "Teacher Blogs" tab has been redesigned to help you find the active teachers in your group.

The "My Profile" section has been completely redesigned to help you manage all of your favorites and make it easier to maintain your personal profile.

New Teacher Blog Themes

Administrator — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 04:53:00 GMT

New teacher themes are here! We have created 14 themes related to education. All of the new themes are based on our popular Paperclip theme which was created for Community Server. The new themes are grouped into three categories; Paperclip - Preschool, Paperclip - Classroom, and Paperclip - School.

We hope you enjoy the new themes. If you have a favorite theme that you have used on another platform or would like to see a new theme related to education, please send us your suggestions.

Here are a few samples of the new themes. You can preview the others and select one for your blog from your blog control panel under "Change How My Blog Looks".

Paperclip - Preschool

Based on the popular Paperclip theme using primary colors and toys for the title images.

Paperclip - Classroom

Based on the popular Paperclip theme with images of new and old classrooms.

Paperclip - School

Based on the popular Paperclip theme with images of new and old schools.

Video Tutorials

Administrator — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:40:00 GMT

We have launched a new section of our site called Tutorials. You can access it from the main navigation bar at the top. In this section, we will be focused on providing video tutorials to help you with using, configuring, and moderating your blog.

All of the videos are free and only require Flash to be installed in order to view in your browser. Most users already have it installed, but if you don't it is free to download.

As of today, we have two videos to get you started and plan to add more over the next few weeks. If you have any suggestions or comments please let us know. We'll put together a video for whatever features you need help with.

Here are the links to the first two. Be sure to check out the main section as we will be adding more in the future.
Create Your First Blog Post
Change How Your Blog Looks

Blog using Windows Live Writer

Administrator — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:13:00 GMT

We have completed an upgrade to our servers to support the use of the new Windows Live Writer application that was recently released in beta. For those of you that haven't tried it yet, we highly recommend that you give it a go. It is a very easy to use program that allows you to compose your posts offline in a WYSIWYG format. It also has some very nice features for adding images to your posts with out having to upload them to our servers first. Any images that you embed into your post will automatically be published right along with your post.

It supports two options for publishing your post. One is simply "Publish to Weblog" which does just that. After it completes, your post will be available for everyone to view and may be listed on the home page under "Latest Lingo". The second option is "Post Draft to Weblog". This is a great option if you want to set some advanced options like a delayed posting date.

You can download the latest version of Windows Live Writer or view the Writer Zone Blog for the latest changes and developments.

We have also created step-by-step instructions for configuring Windows Live Writer for use with TeacherLingo.com. Check it out and let us know what you think.