 Hello everyone, my name is Jeff Bradbury from teachercast.net and today we're going to talk all about WordPress and we're going to teach you how to create a dynamic and very creative classroom website using only a few tools that are going to be free and available to you. We're going to learn the basics of WordPress. We're going to learn how to create a dynamic looking site that looks a little bit difficult but is really really easy to do and then we're going to show you how to take all of that great content that you're creating from videos, audio, your Glogster and much much more and embed it onto your website so your students have a safe and easy place to go to. All resources from today's course are going to be found over on our website teachercast university where you can of course find all of our great online courses and so much more. So let's look at what we're going to learn today. First of all, we're going to learn the basic functions of WordPress. We're going to learn the basic WordPress vocabulary and terminology. We're going to learn how to create a basic WordPress site that is customized to your individual class needs. WordPress is amazing. Over 60% of the websites out there today, more than 45 million websites worldwide are created using WordPress and everyone has the same functions and everyone comes from the same templates. All WordPress websites come from this demo site. It is a very simple and basic theme of which millions of WordPress sites are born from. There's of course four points to every WordPress website, the header, the menu, the sidebar and the content area and from those four easy little bits, the header, the menu, the sidebar and the content area, you are able to turn any WordPress website into something truly amazing for you and your students. So let's take a look here at what we have. Before we begin, we're going to just assume that everybody who's out there watching has a basic knowledge of some computer skills. Doesn't matter if you're on a PC or on a Mac because WordPress is completely web-based, you're going to be able to create something dynamic no matter where you are and no matter what platform you're wearing. We're going to assume that you have an interest in building a website or a blog and most importantly, we're going to assume that you guys have a vision and some creativity for your websites. So there's a few things that you need here. We're going to be looking at what's called WordPress.org, which is where you actually take the free WordPress software, download it and put it on a self-hosted domain. This could be anything like GoDaddy, Bluehost, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there are other free ways of doing WordPress. For instance, you can sign up for a free account at wordpress.com or the one that I always recommend to people, EduBlogs, great WordPress-based websites and everything that we're going to be talking to here today is going to be able to transfer over to those great sites. So what are we going to be talking about? Well again, WordPress basics. We're going to be looking at the difference between a post and a page. We're going to be looking at how to create menus for your websites, how to handle comments, and of course how to insert dynamic media and images and make your website truly something something special. We're going to also look a little bit at WordPress plugins, how to add some social media. One of the big things that people always ask about websites, safety and security, that's certainly a must and all of this is to create a dynamic community for your classroom. So let's do a little bit of introduction. Why should we use WordPress? Why are we going to be creating WordPress when there's so many other sites out there? Well again, WordPress is simple. It starts with a basic theme and from it you can do so much more. So let's dive into WordPress as we bring you our WordPress for beginners course. The first thing that you're going to want to do with WordPress is learn how to log in and it's very, very simple to do so. In order to get to the login site, you just go to your site.com forward slash wp-admin and that's going to take us to our WordPress log in screen. We're going to put in our username and our password and that's going to take us to our dashboard. Now WordPress has two sides to it, a front side and a back side and really we're going to be looking at the back side here when we first start talking about WordPress, the dashboard if you will. It's your WordPress command center. Now there's of course several components to this like the toolbars, the usernames, the site overview, quick press. One thing that I want you to focus on when we get to our dashboard is the dashboard menu. Now this is where all the magic happens from our posts to adding media, creating pages, comments, changing the appearance, adding those dynamic plugins, adding tools and of course adjusting your settings. Everything on our dashboard is very, very simple and laid out. Here's an example of a bar that's called Right Now. You can see it talks about how many pages, how many posts, how many tags, a little bit about our discussion. It even tells you what version of WordPress you're using and what theme. It's very, very simple and easy to look at. Quick press, you know a lot of times people look at WordPress as a blog and it really is but WordPress when you get down to it is so much more. The quickest way to add content is through these little menus like the quick press menu. Here you can enter a title of your blog, you can add your media, you can start typing and before you know it you are creating a dynamic blog. Just want to quick wrap up this segment here on the dashboard and talk a little bit about the different spots. Here you can see everything is laid out for us. Our site names, our user names, our toolbar, help menu, quick press right now, website updates and dashboard menu. So sit right back and let's dive into a real WordPress website. So here we have your basic WordPress website. Again, let's take a look at those four components. You have your heading, you have your menu, you have your sidebar and you have your content area. Now I've already gone through the login process again by going up to the top and typing in forward slash wp-admin and that's going to take us to the back end or the dashboard of our website. Now this looks a little bit cluttered so let's just see if we can take away some of this unimportant stuff. We're going to go up to screen options and we're going to take away some of these unneeded things. We'll take away the welcome, the WordPress blog, any incoming links, some recent comments, some plugins and really we just want to strip away everything basic. Again, here we have our dashboard on the left side. Up here we have some information about our WordPress site and here it tells us that we even have an update. So let's talk a little bit about how to change this into a dynamic website. First thing that we want to do is pick a theme. We're going to go to appearance, themes and we're going to change our theme here to maybe one that's a little bit more academic. So we have an academic theme down here. We're going to hit activate and when we do that and come back to the front of our WordPress site I'm going to hit the refresh button. You'll see that the theme has changed and we are on our way. Now this theme looks very similar but let's check us out one more time. We have our heading, we have our menu but this theme here happens to have two sidebars and it also has some content area. Next thing we want to do is we want to add a picture to it so we can make it look a little bit more with the demo site. So in order to do that we're going to go to the back, we're going to go to header, we're going to insert a file and I'm going to hit upload. You can see we have our beautiful image of our school just under our menu and our heading. So let's talk about creating some content for this. These are all posts and remember I want you to think of a WordPress blog as a diary or a journal. It's a bunch of content that's presented in reverse chronological order. So in order to make a new post we're going to come up here and hit new, post and here we have our post screen. Now our posts and our pages screens look very very similar. We have the box here where we're going to be putting in all of our details. Over here we have our publishing, our format and categories. Categories is really what makes posts work. We can take a post and assign it to a category and we can really be creating a filing cabinet if you will. I want you to think of WordPress really as a content management system or as a database. So you can actually take a post, assign it to multiple categories and actually put it into many different filing cabinet. So let's add stuff to our post here. We're going to put a title on it and we're going to come down here and we're going to say this is a new post and so we're going to create a category and the category is going to be new posts and we will add that category and then we always want to make sure we tag it so we will tag it as new post and it's just that simple. We're going to save draft and I always recommend that you save the draft first and then we are going to publish it and we're going to publish it and then we're going to check out our site one more time and you'll see right here we have new post. It has the date and it has the time and it says this is our new post and when I click on that new post it's going to come up here with our basic idea and creating a page is just as simple. We're going to go up and hit new page and you'll see here that our pages just look very similar to our posts except on the right side here we don't have categories. We have things like parent pages and we can also depending on the theme change the category so I'm going to have here this is a new page and we're going to add here this is a new page so we're going to add some pages again I'm going to save it first we're going to publish it and then when I go to refresh we have a menu item up here that says this is a new page I'm going to click on that here is my new page it says so right here and those are how you create pages and posts now let's talk a little bit about this menu you notice that when we made a new page it automatically shown up here on the menu and in fact with this theme here it actually gives us a different color well what happens if we want to change that menu well I'm going to click up here onto our demo website and scroll down to menus and we don't have any real menus yet the menu that you saw on the front page was really just a default it automatically takes your pages and puts them into an automatic menu so we're going to create a new menu and we're going to call that menu one create menu and we want to put some links on there now we're going to say that we want this menu on the top and we'll say we're going to want this on the bottom and over here we're going to say pages now one of the thing that's not here under most recent is our home and that's actually hidden here under view all so we want to say home add to menu and we're going to save the menu and now we're going to refresh and we're going to see what that looks like on the front of our page here we are in the front page and you'll see we have a custom theme and that custom theme now has the word home on it so let's see if we can add more content to that we're going to click back over to the dashboard and and we're going to want to add our new page so we'll say this new page is going to come here and we're going to add our sample page and let's add one more page we're going to add the link to teacher cast and now notice again there's no page for teacher cast on here but we want to link this to an additional page and so when I hit save and I come back to the front and I refresh you'll see all of those are here now it really does a nice job at making this menu for you but what if we want to make it a little bit different because maybe sample page and and this is a new page go together we're going to take sample page and I'm just going to hold and drag it across save that and what you're going to notice is that menu is now nested into here so we have sample page under this is a new page next to teacher cast so that's how you create a custom menu let's take a look at these sidebars we have one sidebar and two sidebars and this is how widgets get entered into a website we're going to click on appearances and then widgets and we have a ton of customizable widgets and we want to look over here on the right side where it says sidebar home page left and sidebar home page right in fact let's even close this down and we'll see here the left it just says start here and that's going to correlate with everything here that says start here so let's get rid of that and we just did that by dragging and you notice that when we get rid of that and we refresh the front page nothing is over here on the left side it actually takes away the sidebar so let's go back here on the left side and we want to put in a I don't know let's put in a search bar and we'll call this search our site and I'm going to hit save and we will click up here I will refresh and you'll see over here we have a new search bar and the same thing will go for everything on the right side if we want to get rid of the featured posts we can certainly do that and maybe we want to be able to easily log in and log out and so we will put some metadata in here and when we refresh you'll see we now have our login our RSS and some other interesting links so you can of course figure out how to change that so what happens if we want to put some dynamic content in there let's say we want to put in a video well I'm going to go over to YouTube which is where we hold our videos so here you see we have a basic YouTube video and right under here we have the word share we're going to click on share and embed now what we're going to do is we're going to take this embed code and we're actually going to shrink it down by going to custom size and we're going to want to put this on our sidebar so I only want it 200 pixels wide I'm going to come back over here to our widgets and instead of the metadata here let's put a text box and a text box is really not just a text box I can say hello everyone and I can hit save and if I refresh you'll see here it says hello everyone but if I want to this text box can also serve as an HTML embed so I'm going to hit save on this and when I refresh you'll see there is our YouTube video and I can sit and I can play it from here if I want to so in closing you can see that WordPress can create some amazing websites for your classrooms before leaving I want to show you our homepage for our website nbthsmusic.com this is the place where I've created our homepage I welcome you to check it out you'll see here we have our front page with some blog posts here's our homepage for our music theory class again you can check it out headline menu sidebar content area I hope you have a moment of course to check it out and see how you can use your creativity to create a dynamic class website in closing I want to say thank you so much for spending time with us today there's many ways that you can get ahold of me if you have any questions about how to create your dynamic classroom website you can of course follow us on twitter leave us a voicemail at teachercast.net slash voicemail email us at info at teachercast.net or subscribe to us on iTunes and on YouTube at teachercast.net slash iTunes and teachercast.net slash YouTube my name is Jeff Bradbury thank you so much for enjoying this enjoy the rest of the conference and check us out we'll see you soon thanks so much