One of the things that I have had a difficult time with is layout of a post that contains a picture. I would like to wrap text around a picture to eliminate large areas of white space that normally shows up when adding a picture to a post. When adding a picture you do have the option of some minor formatting. These options do allow you to set a picture to the right or left, and with this setting, the text will wrap around the picture. This makes for a much better visual display of a post that contains an image. I do like this very much.

There is a very good YouTube video that describes, in detail, how to do this. It also contains instructions for some advanced formatting by using html code input. It is not extremely difficult, but it does require code entry. It is a demonstration within Wordpress, but I have tested the same process in Elgg, and it works exactly the same.

I have had the opportunity to visit a number of our member schools and share an overview of many of the training sessions that have been my focus during the past two school years. Much of what I want to share with teachers are the possible benefits of a variety of web 2.0 tools that are being made available by ESU #13. In a previous post I spoke about the concepts of communication, collaboration, produce, publish and audience. These five concepts form a circular learning environment that could be seen as learning 2.0. Students would have the opportunity to use a variety of web 2.0 tools to communicate and collaborate with others that have common interests or are participating in similar learning activities. Once the communication and collaboration progresses, the opportunity to actually produce some type of output could arise. The use of web 2.0 tools makes the next steps really exciting. The product that has been created can be published, and the audience for the work is world wide. If an active community can be developed, the published work should lead directly back to starting new communication and collaboration.

The open source environment has now moved into the course development arena. One of the first items I became aware of is the Free-reading.net site. Free-Reading is an "open source" instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading.

The long term success of the open source environment requires the contribution of a large community of people.  The technology is in place to allow anyone that has an interest to become an active contributor.

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