I’m all done with my presentations in Phoenix and my voice is ragged. All that’s left is driving back to the airport where I have a hotel — flying out in the morning. So, I’ve stepped into Tony Vincent’s presentation on Blogging and RSS. I just did my Web 2.0 session so we had worked out that I would go easier on the Blogging stuff, and send folks over to his session for a more detailed look at edublogging.
There is nothing like the honesty and sincerity of conference presenters who are talking from the classroom — and are very good at it. At least some of his teachers are using Kidzblog. I remember taking a look at it a while back but there was something about it that didn’t work. Maybe it required Windows OS. It is actually a client/server set up, where students use an application (Windows and OSX [new]), and then publish to the local server. It doesn’t allow commenting, which is a pretty big drawback, from the conversations I have with educators, commenting is a huge feature for students. I interrupted Tony and asked, and he said that the old version did not allow commenting, but the new version does.
Tony is now showing samples of teacher blogs. They…
- Post daily assignments.
- Announce about upcoming field trips.
- Reports on what’s happening in the classroom — classroom stories.
- Post photos of notes from the white board.
- Use the blog as a platform for students’ work. Teacher poses a question, and students comment their answers.
- Use a school-wide blog to help with school management.
- Use their blogs to engage in professional conversations.
Tony is providing an interesting counter point to the RSS stuff that I use. I use Google Reader and Netvibes. He uses Bloglines. I like Technorati. He likes Bloglines search. That might be an interesting panel discussion for a conference. Have some powerbloggers get together and talk about their tools, what they use and why. What are their favorite features?
It was a pleasure to have you sit in my session, David!
Yeah, and and having less than an hour to cover such a big (and important) subject just isn’t enough time. The surfaced got scratched, but I had to pick what I showed carefully as to not overwhelm the group. Knowing they were all elementary teachers helped me focus on the uses of blogging that I think they’d find most useful. I didn’t even get into individual students having blogs. 🙁
As always, great to see you! I loved listening to the conversations in the hallway as the conference-goers left your superb (as always) keynote.
David –
Thanks for posting Tony’s list! I’ve been asked to give a VERY brief presentation to some teachers tomorrow on blogs and I’m going to grab this list as some examples of why they might want to have one.
Scott
Hello all,
I am usually the “Queen of Google”, but for my Blog organization I really like the Bloglines interface. I just started to explore the clipping feature in bloglines prepping for a session on staying current in the world of InfoClutter. Yesterday I tried to explore the very cool possibilities of Yahoo Pipes, amazing potential. Dave I think you would be better at creating new Pipes, I don’t have the programming background you do, and this is slowing me down.
I’m with Tony vote Bloglines!
Meg Ormiston
I remember trying out Kidzblog a year or so ago, when I first saw Tony Vincent’s podcast and blogs. I had forgotten about it, but was excited to be reminded about it. It looked very simple, and new features – like being able to add haloscan comments would be good. Alas, when visiting the site, it appears the links to download the software are broken. We’ll see if this is temporary situation. There’s no contact info on the website.
Just took a quick look at Kidzblog. It requires FTP for uploading posts by the looks and this has got to be a major drawback. The comments function looks difficult to configure especially if you have to register every user with Haloscan. It does have a nice look and appears relatively easy to use however.
Classblogmeister is the one for me however. Using Flock for images is awesome too.
Count me in on a group presentation about our favorite tools!
Kathy
Tony Vincent was formerly a teacher and tech initiator in our school district. While we miss him, we’re glad the rest of the world will benefit from his ideas!
I prefer Bloglines as well, which I use for all my professional blog reading/news, etc. For personal/leisure blogging, I find that Google Reader is enough. I don’t like to mix the two, because it’s too overwhelming.
Would LOVE to attend a panel discussion about favorite blogging tools!!!