Wikis Research Begins...

Go to bed, stop researching!
Sounds good but it is so interesting. Again this has been on my list for a long time and I am happy to read about someone that is a few steps ahead of me. I will process this article in more depth in the next few weeks. http://kairosnews.org/node/view/3794
Send a comment if you have a thought!

My "short people" during hockey season! 

Viewing Blogger with the Tungsten Browser

The short answer is at this moment it will not work. Maybe it is the template I have selected, but I can only see a portion of the page and cannot see enough to read the entries. I will search around to see what other options there are for viewing the blogs.

AvantGo and comment posting

Once set up, this free app AvantGo "refreshes" each time you hot sync, pushing information out to the handhelds. This can push out news feeds, or blog feeds. Setting up a lesson the teacher would pose a question on the class blog. Once the question is posed by the teacher, students can go in and make comments. The problem is, the comments are immediately pushed back to the web site, but to view them on the handheld there has to be another hot sync.
For back and forth communication I may have to go back to the browser on my Tungsten C and see if I can work with that to interact with the comments. From a management perspective multiple hot syncs per class period will not work, wirelessly or not!

Posting comments issues and ideas

For me the fastest way to craft a comment is on the computer, not on the small “thumb board” on the Tungsten C. I could post directly into blogger through my Internet connection or save in Documents to Go and copy and paste on the TungstenC.

I do have to remember I am an old lady adapting to technology, the kids will have no problems. It will be interesting to see if we will need some keyboards for the classrooms. Going through Docs to Go will work, but it will take a great deal more time because there has to be a sync. No way an entire class can sync quickly!

Blogging on Handhelds

Blogging on a handheld computer, the research continues. I am investigating how this can be done in high school classrooms using the awesome Tungsten C handheld. I am investigating the most seamless way to do this in a number of science and social studies classrooms. As I collect research I will try and share it here.

This site did a great job of spelling out the possibilities. http://www.palmsource.com/interests/weblogging/ For this project I need a free solution, so research continues.

So far so good

My attempts at conversion are not working, I am going to stick with the Atom feed and see if it works for now.

Continued investigation

I am in over my head as I try and convert the Atom feed to an rss feed. if I can get the feed to work in my news reader, I think I will be ok. I am just not sure how universal Atom is.

Not an RSS Feed...

I am investigating Atom feed and rss feeds. I am getting lost in the html coding which is not one of my strengths.

Blogger creates an RSS feed of my blog!

Finally, help to create an rss feed of my very own! Thank you Blogger! Exploring the many options available in settings for my blog, I was shocked to see one of the features is to create an rss feed. I have been researching rss feeds and I see such power for education.

My next step was to figure out how to create my own feed, and a quick click of the button and Blogger took care of it for me! I took the address over to my news aggregator and subscribed to the feed and I am set! Now I need to go back and update the tutorial I just created to add my feed to the list. WOW!

Handhelds and Blogging

As I am gearing up for the new school year, I am exploring how blogging can be used with a new class set of Tungsten C handhelds. I have created this blog to test out blogging before school begins.

In particular I am interested in the use of the comments to communicate and share information with students. I have just changed my comment settings so anyone can post comments. This will be helpful when I am doing professional development with different groups of teachers. I did like the option though to limit who can post. One of the features to select is only making posting of questions available to people associated with the blog. I can also hide comments until they are read.

I am having trouble viewing my blog in the browser on the Tungsten, the text does not fit on the screen making it challenging to read. I can hot sync it and go through AvantGo, but then students need to hot sync to post information. AvantGo reformats the page to fit the handheld screen, making it very easy to read.

More as I explore.

RSS Feeds in Education

The tutorial is complete and waiting for you to download it and explore the power of RSS feeds. I am researching how these feeds can be used in education, and have created a web page filled with information. I see great potential to help people get the information they want, when they need it. I see the power of the feeds for large school districts that need to share information with many different buildings. I see so much potential with the RSS feeds over e-mail groups to disseminate information. I did discover a school district that is using RSS feeds to share information with the community. Check out Bryan ISD in Texas, as I continue my research I hope to find more.

I will keep you posted on my latest research!

Time to Start Blogging!

Well, I thought it was about time to jump in and give blogging a try. Over the past few months I have been researching how blogs can be used in the classroom to promote active learning. Time to jump in and try it myself, so I can share my experiences with other educators.
I see great power in communicating through blogs to reach a broader audience. Yet many educators I have talked with are afraid blogs will turn into nothing but rumor mills and sites for gossip. I will continue to research to see if this is happening.
I have put off starting a blog. One fear is I will not be able to keep up with my blog and keep it fresh. Another reason was I wanted to host my Blog on my own site www.techteachers.com but I tried repeatedly and I just don’t have the programming knowledge to pull this off. Another push back for me was my need for an editor. Publishing two books helped me to see the power of a good editor! It wasn’t until I read a blog (will search for the link) that blogging is more about the process of writing and not the final product.

So here I am with the thousands of other bloggers exploring, learning and experimenting with what a see as a powerful communication tool! More about blogging in education when I return!