Results have gone and come and most of the 2010/2011 crew are now off to college. The class of 2011/2012 have only just settled back in to what will be their final year ever in secondary school… We’ve made some big, sweeping changes to theleavingcert.com as you can now see. All with a view to building / strengthening the community we have here.
Before we go in to the gory detail on the new stuff, we’d like to say a big thank you to last year’s bloggers. Michael, Naoise, Aisling, Amy, Chloe, Cian, Eadaoin, Kate, Kiera 1 & Kiera 2, Richard, Tara and we could go on all day but those guys and more entertained us throughout the year and have set the standard for the new crop of 2011/2012 bloggers… which bring us nicely on to the changes we’ve made this year…
Merger
Firstly, theleavingcert.com & students.theleavingcert.com have been merged to form one supersite. We want students & student blogs to take center stage and that’s what will happen now that the two sites have been merged in to one…
Going Social
We’ve also introduced a membership system where you can sign up (for free) in two clicks if you use our new facebook login feature (you still can register the old skool way by filling in forms too). Once you’re signed up & logged in, you can create your own blog posts and submit them. You can also add other members as friends & comment on their profiles.
Why Sign Up?
One of our most popular features has been our unique exam papers & marking schemes section. Examinations.ie do a terrible job of making exam papers easy to get at… we do it the way it should be done. Pick a subject from a dropdown list and *bang* – you get all exam papers & marking schemes for all years within that subject. We’re making this a ‘members only’ feature though from now on. Once you login it’ll appear in the sidebar.
Points
Members will also get points for all activity they carry out on the site. Submit a new post? You get 5 points. Leave a comment? 1 point. Add a link to our link directory? 1 point etc… whilst we’ve no rewards in place right now, we do have plans for this and it allows us to determine who our star pupils are 😉
Links
We were fed up updating our old ‘links’ page and we know you guys are constantly posting links in comments to other sites so we’ve introduced a user driven links directory where you can add relevant leaving cert links to websites, videos, news articles etc… other users can like / dislike those links and comment on them. This takes the hassle out of googling through all the rubbish to find the quality leaving cert websites you’re looking for. The community will tell you what’s worth visiting and what’s not.
New Design
To top of all of these new changes, we’ve added a new design and tweaked our logo slightly. The site will appear wider and spacier than before, with more focus on the content (student blog posts). Logged in users will also see a special navigation bar at the top of the screen where they can manage their account and create new blog posts.
Get Blogging!
That’s it for now, we’ve more changes in the pipeline but we wanted to roll out these latest changes now so that this year’s LC students can get blogging. All you gotta do is login with your facebook account (over on the right hand side), go up to the nav bar at the top, hover over ‘my account’ and click on ‘new post’.
String a few words together, add a title and once you’ve finished, click on ‘Submit for Review’… your post will go live on theleavingcert.com shortly afterwards. Class of 2011/2012, take it away!!!