Twitter in Education

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I've been thinking about this idea for a while. It's still an idea. The school could have a twitter account though. Maybe for notifying daily events? Must must on this.

Blogs

The Librarians at the school have asked me to develop some professional development around blogs for them. I'm going to make some notes, and start here with them.

Why we blog.

From the WA Department of Education and Training.

"Blogs provide a communication space that teachers can utilise with students whenever there is a curriculum need to develop writing, share ideas and reflect on work being undertaken in the classroom."

From the site Designing e-learning.

"Blogs can be easily maintained and updated through a standard web browser without the need for additional technologies. They are often free of charge to establish'.

What Wiki has to say about blogs.

"A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs."

How we blog.

There are numerous amounts sites that allow you to blog on the internet. Most of them are free.

• http://www.thoughts.com/
• http://edublogs.org/
• http://www.typepad.com/
• http://www.xanga.com/
• http://www.livejournal.com/
• http://www.blog-city.com/

My choice of blogging site is www.blogger.com/

About the layout of a blog How To Blog: A Beginner's Blog Publishing Guide

Posts are actually arranged in reverse chronological order, which means that when you visit a blog on the web, the latest story will appear at the top of the website, and the earlier ones will descend in order beneath it, by how recently they were published to the web.

Posts have a subject or header - just as a newspaper article, or email does

They then have a subject or body - the main part of the post, again just like an email

They most usually have comments - a way that readers can respond to what's been said. This is an important part of blogging, which is much more conversational than print media. As soon as you write something, your readers have a chance to respond to it

They quite often have a time and date stamp - so that readers know how recent the post is. Commonly people aren't so interested in reading out of date posts. Blogging is very much an "of the moment" phenomenon, and while you might create "evergreen" content, it's likely that at least some of your posts will be time sensitive.

Have you read any blogs from Librarians?

Why don't you check out Librarian in Black or the The Shifted Librarian or maybe the Librarian.net.

Tuesday 26 May

The new 24/7 digital recording box came in last week. The technicians began to set it up and discovered it was only showing up 5 of it's 6 hard drives. I liased with the company this morning explaing that I wasn't comfortable opening up a "brand new" box, however she explained that I should and it may have just been from the shipping. Along with the Tech we opened it up, jiggled the right wires and it has seem to have worked.

The photography students needed to raise a little more money for their middle of the year exhibition so they held a sale of prints. I donated a few prints which sold. I didn't really get to stick around as I was upstairs fixing the box. I'm finding I'm being pulled in a few directions at the moment and it's hard to stay in one spot and focus.

I've orgaznied with the new web designer or talk and discuss the ins and outs of the hosting situation of the school website. He will hopefully be in on Monday to show the Principal, Vice Principal and myself. The idea is that a few people with permissions will be able to update the site via a content management system design. I'm really looking forward to it, my only concern is that sometimes CMS look "clunky" or "un-user friendly," so when I see the designs, or mock, hopefully this is not an issue I will have to talk to the designer about!

I am continuing to update the Staff Bulletin with ecurriculum news. The latest batch of links were from Boroondara Ultra Wiki. A place to find out about Ultranet as well as promote some of the great use of ICT in schools in the Boroondara Local Government Area.

All these, a dozen emails,Photographic Studio Class, and VET Multimedia till 8pm. Whataday!!!:D