Just a quickie this week, because it’s going to be built into a whole new support structure very very soon, but check it out… we has videos.

Not quite I can has… but we’re working on it :)

This week we’ve been mostly working on getting our K-12 Edublogs site, hosted at http://learnerblogs.org up and running on the same database structure as our teacher version – which you’re enjoying now!

And so far so good, we know that sites hosted at learnerblogs.org have been unacceptably slow of late – partly do to a huge surge in popularity and partly to us focusing a bit too much on edublogs.org – but from now on that should be a thing of the past.

And just for fun we’ve also introduced another layer of comment spam protection – so now your school students can blog quickly and even more safely too.

If you care to wander past your ‘Presentation’ tab you’ll find four rather marvellous new themes, even if we do say so ourselves.

Terra Firma is an exquisite balance of boxes and beauty, Citrus Island will take you to the heights of web2.0 minimalist orange fashion, Reaching Darkness is one of the most well-put-together darker themes that we’ve seen in a while and – my personal favourite – would have to be ASCII2 (pictured) if only because it’s so wonderfully darn retro.

In fact we almost installed Commodore 64 styled themes and more – but decided not to as that might be a touch too geeky… however, we could be wrong, and there could also be plenty of other themes which edubloggers would like to see, so why don’t you let us know.

What WordPress themes would you like to have on Edublogs?

A couple of exciting new additions to Edublogs this week, the MyBlogLog widget and the ability to embed Slideshare in your posts.

To set up the MyBlogLog widget just cruise to ‘Sidebar Widgets’ under ‘Presentation’ and drag and drop.

To embed a Slideshare slide just copy it’s wordpress.com embed ID… replace with spaces the ‘id=’, ‘&doc=’ and delete the &w=425. More info on that here.

Update: You can now just copy and paste the code they provide for WordPress.com, i.e.

Thanks to Ring Of Blogs for the fix.

Not content with bringing you funky ways to upload and present your files, Edublogs now also allows you to share those files – be they course notes, worksheets, favourite songs or great big image files – using a very funky Box.net widget.

How does it work? Just go to your Presentation tab, click on Sidebar Widgets and drag and drop the Box.net file sharing widget into a sidebar.

Then click on the little configure icon (on the widget) and take it from there.

Couldn’t be easier huh… are we becoming your one stop online teaching and learning shop… or wot :)

Well, only because we have to ;)

Seriously though, the vast majority of Edubloggers are MS users and the vast majority of Word docs, presentations and spreadsheets are produced as .doc, .ppt or .xls files.

So, now when you upload or link to any of these documents to edublogs – your readers will, courtesy of ThinkFree Viewer, be able to simply view (as well as download) the file online in a rather neat fashion.

Update: This is now a plugin, so go turn it on :)