Here are some notes on the things you might like to look into. I’ve included a few links too, but if you can’t see the one you were after, then try going to my del.icio.us page (there is a link in the bottom right hand corner of this page).
1. Blogging - this is my blog! Also have a look at www.technolote.com/chinese which is the blog I use with my students.
Ways to use a blog in your classroom:
- Write a post about what you are going to do in class that day
- Get the kids to scribe about the class and then post their writing
- Write a post that encourages discussion and get the students to leave comments about what you have written - or about what another students has written.
If you want to set up student blogs, a good site to go to is:
www.incsub.org/blog and www.edublogs.org
Both of these sites have been founded by James Farmer, an expert in online social networking. Edublogs provides a very secrure environment for student blogging.
Other good sites are Blogger or Wordpress.
Adding groovy things like polls and Clustrmaps to blogs is really easy. You search for a site that offers those sorts of things, customise your item, then copy the html code the site provides you with, and then paste it into the relevant area of your blog. You don’t have to know what the code means, you just have to know where to put it.
2. RSS Feeds
Ok, so you have found a few blogs that you like to read regularly. But, it’s a pain going to all those different sites in order to check if they have written anything new only to find out they haven’t and you’ve wasted 15 minutes looking at them all. What you need is to find the RSS feeds on these sites and collect them all together in a feed reader.
- RSS explained in Plain English: (Video courtesy of Commoncraft Social Design for the Web)
- RSS - Really Simple Syndication. This is how websites give out information about the updates on their sites. A site that has an RSS feed is effectively sending out a stream of invisible information about the lastest updates to the site. You can subscribe to this feed in order to make it easy to keep up-to-date on the lastest content on the site.
- Feed Reader - is what you need in order to read this stream of invisible information. A feed reader, like Google Reader or Bloglines, reaches out and grabs this invisible information stream and puts it in a place for you to read. Feed readers can grab lots of streams of invisible info and bring it all to the one place. If a webpage has a feed you will usually be able to see a little orange icon somewhere on the page. You can also subscribe to feeds by email.
- Creating Feeds - good news is that you don’t have to! Feeds are full of funny looking code that will give you a headache. Most Web 2.0 sites have feeds automatically built in.
In the classroom:
- Collecting updates from blogs on a particular topic in one place, making it easy for students to compare contecnt of different blogs.
- Different students could monitor different blogs easily.
3. Burning The Feed
If you have a site that you post to regularly (or plan to), then you can ‘burn’ the feed that your page has. All this means is adding some bells and whistles to your feed so that a bit of extra information is added to it before it hits someone’s feed reader.
The place to do this is Feedburner.
Feedburner also gives you the code to cut and paste so that you can easily add different buttons to your site - for example, I added the ‘Powered by Feedburner’ button that is under the Meta heading on the sidebar.
4. Social Bookmarking - Delicious!
Social Bookmarking is simply an online list of your favourites that can be shared publicly. You can then create a network of other people’s lists and they can join themselves to your network. The most widely used social bookmarking site is del.icio.us. A delicious site looks like this:
5. Some really cool free stuff
The Generator Blog - generate a whole range of cool things like signs and name tags for your blog
Language Online Memory Game Maker - free flashcard game maker
Photo To Sketch - change your photos into pencil sketches
Scrap Blog - online scrapbooking
Skrbl - online collaborative drawing
6. SMART Board
If you have a SMART board then get onto www.pdtogo.com/smart . This site and podcast have heaps of lessons, ideas and useful websites to try.
Also have a look at: Smart Education.
If you’ve got any questions about any of this please send me an email.
To learn more about the technoLOTE email discussion group and how you can join check out this post: Talking It Through.
Recent Comments