Blogs and RSS in Education
In the News
Albany Diocese Principals Technology Blog: http://principalsalbany.blogspot.com/
An Interview with Alexander Russo: About Blogs: http://www.educationnews.org/an-interview-with-alexander-russo.htm
Blogs in the Classroom: http://faculty.washington.edu/kegill/pub/gnomedex05/
This presentation at Gnomedex outlines the case for blogging in the classroom,
stipulates some practices (eg., have students use only one blogging tool),
and makes some development requests (eg., a means of countinbg comments and
posts).
Blog Readership Surged 58 Percent
in 2004: http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/traffic_patterns/article.php/3453431
This Pew study also profiles bloggers, and says RSS aggregation is a wave
of the future for online information consumption.
How you SHOULD use blogs in education: http://blogsavvy.net/how-you-should-use-blogs-in-education
Legal Guide for Bloggers: http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/
" Whether you're a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you've
been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting
in trouble for what they post."
Making Sponsors Walk the Plank:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/business/04online.html?th&emc=th
"Any company that tries to pull a fast one on an increasingly media-savvy
populace should first consider the power of blogs."
SuperGlu: http://www.suprglu.com/
" SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In
a nutshell, SuprGlu:
* gathers your content from popular webservices and
publishes them in one convenient place.
* presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can
customize.
* is FREE to use!"
What is a blog?
You can see my blog at: http://studyplans.blogspot.com/
A good place to start creating your own blog:
Blogger: http://www.blogger.com/start
Edublogs: http://www.edublogs.org/
"Free blogs for educational professionals"
Global Voices: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/
As the name suggests, this site features links to blogs from around the world.
Read about daily life in Kenya or Hong Kong. Learn about economic issues in
India. You can even listen to podcasts, or downloadable audio clips. The bloggers
featured on Global Voices are diverse, but the thing they have in common is
they have something interesting to say.
MoTime: http://www.motime.com/
Web logs started out primarily as a self-publishing movement for both professional and armchair journalists.
WordPress: http://wordpress.com/
A blog is part Web site, part journal, and part free-form writing space. For some, blogging is like a digital diary. A weblog is personal -- it's done by a person, not an organization. You see a personality.
A weblog is on the Web -- it doesn't get printed, it can be updated frequently, it's very low cost to produce, and it can be accessed through a Web browser. However, no HTML is required. Blog programs are designed to be as easy to use as a word processing application, but with additional collaboration and communication features.
Reasons for blogs in the classroom
A blog is produced with an active writer in mind. A blogger communicates an identity, a personality, and a point of view.
Blogs offer students an interactive and immediate publishing tool.
Blogs provide a real audience for students.
It is a collaborative environment.
Students can give and receive feedback from each other,
parents, their teacher, and other professionals.
It can become a forum for discussions among educators.
Classrooms around the world can work together on projects.
When students have their own blog, all of their written work can be found in one place. It can become a writing portfolio.
Ways to Use Weblogs in Education: http://anvil.gsu.edu/EduBlogInsights/2004/10/05#a668
Weblog Criteria: http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/crit2.html
Student Weblog Chart: http://www.beewebhead.net/Evo05/student.htm
Teacher Weblog Chart: http://www.beewebhead.net/Evo05/teacher.htm
Blogs in education
Blogging in the Big Apple: http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=53200212
Weblogs are becoming more and more commonplace but educators ask about their
potential with students. Here's advice on how they can use this new technology
and how current research measures it.
Bloglet: http://www.bloglet.com/default.asp
Bloglet offers email subscriptions so that you can send one email to everyone
in your class. They sign up at the Bloglet site.
Blogs Versus Blahs: http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2005/01/01/04instruction.h16.html
In-class Web logs can bring out students' best—and their worst.
Carmack's Critters: http://www.butlerville.net/1a/
Delano High School: http://www.delanohighschool.org/
Education 1102: Writing - Research - Reading the World Wide Web: http://cyberdash.net/online1102/index.php
Ms. Schacher's Geometry Blog: http://schacsgeometry.motime.com/
Peter Scott's Library Blog: http://blog.xrefer.com/
UAS looks to computers to improve teaching of
writing: http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/121604/loc_20041216006.shtml
Teachers in Alaska, California, Michigan, West Virginia and New York City
are learning how to use computers to improve student writing. They are participating
in a pilot project funded by the National Writing Project.
Webblogg-ed - Using Weblogs and RSS in Education: http://www.weblogg-ed.com/
Considerations when blogging
10 Things We Learned About Blogs: http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2004/poymoments.html
Many districts have a person
designated to approve what goes on the schools website or that students cannot
publish on the school's website. This is not feasable if students are publishing
frequently and defeats the purpose of the blog.
As a solution, students can have parents sign permission slips that give permission
to publish online.
Also, student pictures or personal identifying information is not put in the
blog.
The blog can be password protected.
The schools Acceptable Use Policy may have to be updated with an added line
that allows students to publish to the blog site.
Students, as a class, may write their rules for blogging and sign the agreement. If the rules are not followed, the student is not allowed to post online.
RSS
First you need to subsribe to
an aggregator, such as:
Bloglines: http://bloglines.com/
Then look for an orange box with XML
in it.
Click on it and copy the link that is
there.
Paste it in the aggregator and you are
subscribed!
10x10: http://www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html
"Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading
international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted
linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After
this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important
words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images,
culled from the source news stories."
Newsmap: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
" Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing
landscape of the Google News news aggregator."
The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html
Wiki
Extreme Blogging: http://www.forbes.com/best/2004/1213/bow001.html
" Passively browsing the Web may be a thing of the past. New technologies
are taking collaborative Web spaces to the next level."
This site began in March 1998 and was created
by Janet Luch. This page was last updated on
December 12, 2005
Email to studyplans@yahoo.com.