So simple to get started

I had a workshop yesterday morning for an hour and a half with seven teachers from the local high school. They were interested in finding out about blogs and how they might use them to communicate with parents and students. I showed them a few moments of the video which we were given as a link in our class last week and also played a podcast which I had created with some grade 7 students last spring describing how they value blogging. By the end of the session, three of the participants had a blog that they were ready to publish, three more were working on their ideas, and one was convinced that blogging was not for him and his teaching style.

Some good questions that I have heard before but are worth reporting. I wonder what your responses to them would have been.

1. I have a lot to do in my day as it is. What is the value of reviewing student blogs and marking them? Can't I just continue to do that with them at their desks?

2. Some of my students don't have computers at home and I don't have enough computers in my class to make this worthwhile. Am I treating those kids without access fairly, even if I make blogging optional?

Comments? Cheers... Bob

Widgets for your blog

Another important aspect of a blog is the widgets one embeds in it to explore the blog to its full potential.
There is one element that I think most important in a blog and that is the RSS feed feature.
In a very non technical language, RSS Feed is a fairly easy way to be notified about the update of content in someone's blog, site, wiki, etc.

How is this possible? By subscribing to a blog's feed through a RSS feed aggregator (also called RSS feed reader) one no longer has to constantly check a blog to check for its update. It will directly be fed into the rss reader. Only one place where all the blogs you read come together. Can it get any better than this?! :-)

There are many rss readers available on the web. I used protopages in the past, and now I turned into igoogle, which lets me use many widgets in only one space, including several and different RSS feed readers. So every time I log in to my computer it just jumps into my face, since I have igoogle as my home page! ...but that is just my strategy to keep up to date with the blog world. Here is my protopage, in case you want to have a look at it.

Bloglines and google reader are also other two good rss readers, which you can subscribe to for free.

For more info about RSS feed we recommend you watch RSS Feed in Plain English by Common Craft.

More about different widgets later!
Looking forward to your comments.

Next Blog issue

I have not personally experienced a problem with this issue as I don't get an opportunity to have a blog that I share with students, but, I have had the question presented to me as to what, if anything, can be done about the Next Blog button that is on the blogger pages. The purpose of this button is to take the user to a random blog which can often be commercial, spam, or pornographic.

It is my understanding that this is a default part of the template and it not to be removed.

Cheers... Bob

High school Math and Science Blogs

I'm curious as to how to use blogging in high school math and science courses. If anyone has come across blogs of this nature, please let me know. Thanks!

Approving Blogs

Approving blogs for publication can be a tedious process. Some teachers will use the approval feature( such as the one in Classblogmeister) to ensure that their students do not inadvertently have something published that discloses personal information about them, their families, or their classmates. I believe that was the original intent of the approval process being enabled.

I worked with a teacher in our district who used the approval tool for a different reason. He wanted to review the content in much the same way that he would review any other piece of writing done by his students. His commitment to rapidly reviewing his student blogs meant that when a student checked in the following day or blogging period, if their blog was not up for public review, then there was something that needed further editing. This lead to more collaboration with peers or with the teacher to review the work to get it to a stage that it was ready for the outside world.

I thought that was a pretty good use of the review / approval tool, but it does rely on the teacher being as committed to the student blog as the student.

This link is a tutorial for setting up a Classblogmeister blog for a class.

Using blogs in Education

Welcome to our workshop's blog. This space is also yours, so please blog us away with your wonderful ideas, perspectives and experiences.

Sharing and collaborating with one another is the most important feature of the blogging activity, which enables blogger participants to achieve their purposes in a meaningful way.

Let's all blog!