Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Opening the Doors


I've got two platforms set up now for my two sophomore classes to play around with. One group is working with a wiki which we are going to explore as a common space. The second has a home page in the form of a blog, the one where I've been trying to figure out the aggregation questions. It's got a shape now that works provisionally, and I've got two kinds of aggregators, based on Google Reader and Pageflakes. The students have jumped right in with both feet, and I'm pretty excited by what is starting to take shape, not only on my own site but on the sites that my colleagues Mark and Chris have set up. I'm meeting with one of our tech guys tomorrow; he's got an alternate platform set up that we may switch over to. If we're going to do that, I'd like to do it sooner rather than later. But I thought I'd post the links to what we've got, even though the paint is still wet and the furniture hasn't all arrived yet. If you have feedback or suggestions, let me know.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Steve,

I am doing much the same thing, but I am the tech guy setting up the pages for faculty. I am showing them how to use Pageflakes to filter their information on specific topics. Bringing it to the students is the next level.

What are your students using it for? What are you "switching" to? Thanks for the post.

Bruce Schauble said...

The idea was to have students be able to post to their own blogs and also have those posts show up in a common class blog page so that we could read one another's work and post comments in a commmon space. Pageflakes was a workaround because I couldn't get blogger to do what I wanted it to do. I like pretty much every else about blogger, and it's easy to use, but I wasn't making headway with the aggregation issue.

But we've got Moveable Type set up on our school server and my tech guy has figured out to do what I want, so tomorrow is going to be moving day; I'm gonna have the kids switch over to the new site. I'll post the url as soon as it's operational.

- Bruce

Unknown said...

Thanks Bruce. And I apologize about calling you Steve. Don't know where that came from.

Mr. MacKnight said...

Hi Bruce,

First, I really enjoy reading your posts, having discovered Throughlines just a few days ago.

I've been running student blogs since September. You can have a look at my Grade 8 blog here: http://etm8.learnerblogs.org.

I've also just written a piece reflecting on what I've learned so far from this experiment, and where I'm headed. You can have a look at it here: http://www.ericmacknight.com/wordpress/?p=65.

As you'll see, I've opted for a single class blog, rather than individual blogs for each student. I'll be very interested to see how your approach works out.

Cheers,

Eric MacKnight

Bruce Schauble said...

Thanks, Eric. I'll check your site out...

- B