Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

Session 3

blogging basics and beyond
Tammy Worcester
www.tammyworcester.com
walk through on creating a blog on blogger
name, address
check address availability
enter the captcha letters
choose theme or template
can always change it later
continue
blog has been created - you can start blogging
add a post and then you can view the blog

different ways you can post to the blog
you see the tools, pencil and the new post button - only the blog owner sees those
you can remove components if you don’t like some of what is on the sidebar.

igoogle - search for blogger
add gadget that allows you to post to blogger right from igoogle

go to customize
you can set up a scheduled post like all your spelling words or a tech tip per week
go to link for email and mobile
ignore send address  (you can have it email people everytime you post here)
scroll down to posting options
create an email address
you can send a blog post from any email account

can set it up to require word verification and if it should email you when you get a comment and you have to approve it - moderated

some new blogger settings
you can now create pages of static information (up to ten static)

jump break
lets you just show partial posts with a link to continue

vocaroo.com
lets you record your voice, listen and if you are happy with it click post on the internet
you will get some embed code to paste into your blog.

other embeddable:

youtube video
delicious tags
flickr slide shows
issuu upload a pdf and makes an ebook
chat room meebo
polldaddy
voki

teacher ideas
weekly newsletter
sharing student work
spelling lists
teaching tips
a blog of widgets
resources for parents
feedback from parents
lesson plans
absent student info

teacher and student blog ideas
reading response journal
gathering data
photo essays
younger students - post pic of something green for example

Takeaway:

The best “new” information here was that you can now set up the email address in blogger that you want posts emailed to.  If you are using blogger with your class your students will not have to log in to the actual blog.  They just email their posts in.  You then set it to notify you whenever a post comes in and you can moderate what appears in the blog.  Much easier and better control.

I am subscribed to so many more rss feeds that I have time to read and often I will subscribe to a blog that is written by someone with multiple interests because they occasionally write about something I am interested in.  This means that I will see a lot of article titles that are not what I want to read.  I discovered a new tool today that will help me shrink some of that reader “bloat”

It is called Feedsifter and can be found here

You just put in the URL of the site and then type in the keywords you are interested in and Feedsifter creates a second feed that you can subscribe to.  Now you have a feed tailored to your interest!

If you have a google account the easiest thing in the world is to sign in.  Go to igoogle and click add stuff .  Looking down on the left sidebar you will find a choice for entering a url - paste the feed URL that feedsifter created there and you will now have this feed show up directly on your igoogle homepage.

I have often used del.icio.us to create a feed of bookmarks on a specific subject.  Today I created one for googledocs and using Feedsifter I had it make a new feed that would show me only googledoc bookmarks that contain spreadsheet and/or form.  Now I have an area that helps me keep up with new blog posts on Google spreadsheets. This won’t be a perfect solution but it helps me narrow down some of what shows up in my reader now.

This tip came from The Simple Dollar - thanks to them for a great hint!

My very environmentally conscious friend Frances submitted a bag design in the Kroger(R) Design a Reusable Shopping Bag contest.

PLEASE!!! Vote for her Kroger reusable bag design at kroger.com!!! You can
vote once a day - thanks!!

View design and vote

http://www.designagreenbag.com/vote-for-designs/bag.aspx?BagId=9662

Next week I am planning on attending TCEA 2008 in Austin. Dale is doing well and I will be a cell phone call away. I am looking forward to learning some new things and meeting some folks that I have till now known only through blogging.

I plan, as I did last year, to blog my notes. If you do not blog and are going to be attending this year from PISD, I would love to have you as a “guest blogger”! Just let me know if you are interested and we can arrange for your notes/reflections on the conference to appear as a guest post by you to share with the rest of the district.

If you are a blogger I have a few tips for you. Take good notes making sure you have the session name, presenter name, and school district if applicable. Check out HitchHikr - a site that will aggregate posts that are tagged for specific conferences. There is no tag yet so you might want to check back - it will be something like TCEA08. If you tag our post with the HitchHikr tag it will make it easier for people who didn’t attend the same sessions to find your notes. As conference attendees start posting and tagging, the posts will show up on the HitchHikr site and there will be an RSS link so you can subscribe if you like and read other posts. This is a great way for all of us to get the most out of the conference and share the information with folks in the district who couldn’t attend.

There is a great post at Lunch Over IP on tips for conference blogging with links to other articles if you are interested in reading more about this. They have even created a PDF booklet you can download. There are two versions and I have included one here.

conferenceblogging_zuckerman-giussani_a4_color_booklet.pdf

Stop by Lunch Over IP blog and leave a thank you comment if you find this useful. I’m excited about the conference and can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Also posted at Thoughts Have Wings

This survey can be found at the Dangerously Irrelevant Blog. I am interested in seeing the results. I hope if you are a blogger in education that you will participate.

I started out searching for how writing is taught so that in the future I might be a better commenter. I found some wonderful resources and I’m going to share them here before they disappear into bookmark oblivion.

The first is from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory and is called 6+ 1 Trait Writing.

The 6+1 Trait Writing framework is a powerful way to learn and use a common language to refer to characteristics of writing as well as create a common vision of what ‘good’ writing looks like. Teachers and students can use the 6+1 Trait model to pinpoint areas of strength and weakness as they continue to focus on improved writing.

There are lesson plans, assessment, prompts and more. There is more on this at The Writing Fix and at eMints which has a huge list of links that even include classroom posters you can print out.

The next treasure is The Scribe Initiative which is a wiki of the San Antonio School system dedicated to digital storytelling. There is an incredible wealth of resources here including links to open source software for editing audio, tutorials for using MovieMaker and PhotoStory, sources for images and sounds and much more. If you want to take your student’s writing digital this is a great place to start.

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say? ”
E. M. Forster

My personal blog got a junior high rating.  I wonder if that has some kind of significance?

Cross-posted at Thoughts Have Wings.

We have some students who are blogging and I have started visiting their blogs to leave comments and encourage them. This is so exciting to see! I know that this is not a new thing in some districts but for us it is brand new and I feel like I have had a tiny bit of influence here. I don’t teach these students - I’m not even on the same campus. I was one of the first bloggers in our district and I have been an advocate so I feel a little like a proud mama or at least great aunt. I hope they find a new way to express themselves, a new way to communicate with each other, and new ways to find the common ground that connects us to each other as members of the human race. Then again, maybe all that will happen is their grammar and spelling will improve because they realize other people are reading what they write. I’m betting on the former.

I am amazed, amused, and awed!

• “I got my truck stuck in a Blog
• He looks naked without a Starbucks cup next to him.
• What system is Halo on?
• Halo who?
• does the audio sound like…chipmunks to anyone else?
• the minds of our school board members are boundaries
• their boundaries are in their minds
• …..and in our firewalls
• I think we are sometimes our own limiting boundaries!
• I can’t search google images or right click!!!
• The IT department often are boundaries
• I think his point today about needing to create and define new boundaries given the “loss of boundaries” was an important statement
• my boundaries are clear and blocked
• Ignorance is a boundary… must educate more teachers!
• networks are our information
• traditional school has focused on information, but david is right, the focus on OVERWHELMING quantities of info is new
• remind me to thank my district IT guys tomorrow…despite our differences in vision, they are nowhere near as obstructionist as what I am reading here…
• We discussed the value of YouTube for education at school today.
• I can act individually with information but its nowhere near the experience if I work with that same information in a network of people.
• Policy’s simply need to be more accomodating. Things don’t move in 5 year plans anymore.
• we just rewrote our tech plan around ideas instead of tasks
• who will decide the content?
• they can’t make decisions ahead of the changes
• Kids may not all be more information literate but they are actively engaged in social networking. That’s why I think David said we need to provide the traction and learning to help them learn to teach themselves.
• intellectual capital will be the value
• that point David is addressing is the ATTENTION ECONOMY
• relearn, unlearn & Learn
• Our IS department was pointing out that their own jobs are now 24/7
• Educators can’t be afraid to right/click
• creativity almost entirely defies traditional measurement methods
• Hard to assess W 2.0 using AD 1950 multiple choice
• we can each recognize creativity, but we can’t put that in a bar chart in the same way we can with test scores
• opportunities to fail and learn
• How do we emphasize balance video games with real world experiences?
• I think a big part of having a learning engine in the classroom is writing hyperlinked texts
• effectively writing hyperlinked texts is a measurable outcome of the learning engine classroom
• digital doppler
• I’m a proponent of gaming, but balance is so important
• Something wrong with my kids, they don’t like gaming
• I’m TOTALLY unbalanced, but I love it (though I need to exercise more than my mouse-finger)
• they have treadmills with computers built in to the front now.
• We had some success with getting them to participate in gym class by using DDR.
• Wii rocks!
• i think “digital discipline” is a good term in this context. we all need it. balance fits in there too.
• DDR is a blast
• I think we all strive to have some “grounding” with the flexibility to fly a bit (or more)!
• Heard a discussion on ReadingTeacher this week where they said balanced doesn’t mean equal time for everything (as in balanced literacy).
• if you ban it, kids never learn to balance their lives. We have to let them fail. That’s where lessons are learned
• how do we bring down the walled garden at school?
• I think the best advice is to throw out the textbooks
• I still see way too many teachers thinking integration is focusing on the technoogy instead of the content…
• I’m launching a year-long classroom blogging unit (major overhaul from last year) - key elements: they claim their blogs on Technorati, they link to at least one blogger from the real world that they admire, they blog about what THEY’re interested in (within limits), and their goal is to grow readership network and extend self-directed learning.
• if only we had time to learn with the kids - partners
• I’m finishing a degree in assistive technology, and I signed up for a lab class this semester that has no lab… its all lecture
• it’s because librarians don’t get enough partnership with teachers!!
• so the teacher becomes the affective filter
• The teacher is the model - not the information giver
• I’m finding that it’s really tough to move students beyond the “consume and remix” stage in information processing. They love the creative aspect of playing with the tools, but to many the tools are more important than the message. I’d like students to take the time to “digest” the info and build it into an existing framework, or better yet, make a case for revamping the framework - then creatively communicate the learning.”

WOW!

For more on filtering there is a very thought provoking article on Doug Johnson’s blog.

Today was just a day but wow - exhausting, frustrating, exciting, enlightening. I was busy all day because grades were due to be exported and it was taken a little more seriously than the three weeks progress reports so there were a few problems to be ironed out underlining the value of that first export. Troubleshooting that should have been done happened today when we were under the gun.

The day that seemed to not end did and I came home and ate supper while I signed in to Elluminate for the K12 Online Conference Fireside Chat with David Warlick. This was my first experience with Elluminate which is a fee based meeting software package that donates the space to the K12 Online Conference. There are multiple windows. On the far left is a window that contains first a picture of an old-fashioned microphone, To speak you click on the picture and then click again when you are done. There is a hand icon that you can click to virtually raise your hand. There are emoticons and as people enter the session the list of names grows and automatically adjusts to remain in alphabetical order. There is a running tally of how many people are in the session. When things got going there were 105 people from all over. Mostly from the U.S. but some from other parts of the globe as well including Sudan, Seoul, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Scotland Click the thumbnail to see a screenshot.

There was a white board and video and as the session went on, questions were asked on the white board as a rapid, unending discussion by the attendees. I went crazy trying to concentrate on what David was saying as well as keeping up with the “stream of consciousness” instant messaging. I managed to speak a bit when we were divided into separate rooms at the beginning and I was able to text once or twice but by the time I could type a question the conversation would have changed. There was serious energy. These folks are jumping in the deep end of the pool and splashing for all they are worth. They are calling out to the rest of us to tell us to come on in - the water is fine. Some of us are dipping a toe in and shivering, some are paddling around with nose plugs and life preservers. Some of us are sitting it out and some are underwater with flippers and scuba gear.

There was a 14 year old student in the session and the possibility of adding a student strand next year was mentioned.

My favorite quote was ” become the guide on the side not the sage on the stage”. I saved the chat transcript so I could go back and read it and when I have that processed I will talk a little more about it.  One exciting thing was recognizing names of people that I have communicated with through blogging.

I watched the keynote by David Warlick this morning and I’ll blog about it later. I want to let it marinate a bit but it was awesome. It is well worth the time - if you right-click and save link as you will have a copy of it to view whenever you have time. - which is the beauty of an online conference!