Instructional Technology Blog » Blogging

Seattle Schools Network on Ning

Harvey — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:41:07 +0000

Ning is a social networking site that allows anyone to create an online network for almost any purpose. The Instructional Technology group has created a Seattle Schools social network on Ning to allow educators an online space to connect and share with others. This social networking space has been created to accompany the professional development being provided to certificated staff as part of the BEX III Levy, however the open nature of the environment means it is possible for users of the Ning to create their own affinity groups and forums on just about any topic related to teaching and learning. Using Ning, individuals can post to their own blog, upload files such as word docs, and share ideas in the form of rich media such as video or podcasts. If you haven’t explored social networking as an additional support to your work in Education, create an account and explore our Ning at seattleschools.ning.com

Blogging Poetry

Janice — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:58:02 +0000

Kristi Dahlstrom, Language Arts/Journalism teacher at Ingraham high school created a collaborative poetry project with one of her Language Arts 9 classes. Students have been writing and refining their poetry over the last few weeks in preparation for publishing to the class blog.

Besides learning to write poetry, students learned to write specific praise and constructive criticism for commenting on each other’s work. They practiced this element of the project on poems posted to the blog by Kristi and her student teacher. Kristi observed, “Students are now posting their own work and commenting with maturity and grace! Success!”
You can see their project by going to http://www.msdahlstrom.edublogs.org

Kristi says, “I set up a class blog using Edublogs called The Ninth Wall, and created usernames for each of the students in my class. This was time-consuming, requiring me to split one email address 25 times to create unique usernames, but it takes several steps out of the process, including the tricky one that requires students to have email accounts, which many do not. I used Gmail, adding numbers and letters (1A, 1B, 1C, etc.) after a plus sign and before the @gmail.com. For example, an account address would have been ingraham.la.student+1L@gmail.com. It worked very well, allowing me to keep track of passwords through a single account. For more on how to set up this type of gmail account click here.

After setting up the accounts, Kristi asked each student to submit at least one poem to the blog to form a class anthology. Before the poems were published to the blog they went through an editing stage. After being edited, the poems were turned in to Kristi and she posted them to the site. To make sure that the students’ comments were serious, Kristi gave herself complete moderating control. This takes teacher time, but is worth it for the quality of comment she is asking of her students.

If you ask Kristi if all the time spent was worth it, she says: “This has been the most enjoyable project! I would highly recommend it.”

Resources:
http://www.edublogs.org
Why Should I Blog with My Students

Why Should I Blog With My Students?

Janice — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:15:09 +0000

Many teachers want to have a place where they can easily post materials for student use, showcase student projects and provide a forum for online discussion. Blogs provide this venue for teachers and students by offering a community forum for their use. Posts to the blog can be photographs, video, audio or word processed, making blogs a good place to post student and teacher multimedia projects which can be viewed from any computer, anywhere, anytime. This allows student, parent and teacher interaction from home, school, the library, and web enabled cell phones.

Here are some reasons to use a classroom blog:
1. Post materials and resources for students and parents
2. Host online discussions based on books your students are reading, discussion topics from your classroom, etc.
3. Create a class publication such as a monthly newsletter that can be read online.
4. Post student projects and writing for peer and teacher review.
5. Share your lesson plans and web links
6. Integrate multimedia of all kinds
7. Organize projects, events, information
8. Get feedback from fellow teachers, parents, students which builds a community around your classroom.

Blogging with your classes

The Seattle School District does not block EduBlogs. Go there and sign up for their free Blog. You can use this site for audio casts as well as video.
If you want to get email for your students that is not blocked by the district go to Gaggle.net
If you want your students to work from a different email at home, Edublogs recommends gmail from Google and their great help source, The Blogger, tells you how to do this.

Tutorials for Edublogs:
Quick Guide to get you started: edublogstutorial
A complete tutorial with updates from Edublogs support in pdf format: edublogging

Copyright and Safety:
When you or your students are blogging there are copyright issues and safety issues to consider. Here are some sites that will help you deal with both.
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
This law explains how a child’s privacy is protected online. Working with children and blogs, this is a must-read item.
Copyright and Fair Use.
This simple primer gives the basics on copyright and fair use laws as it pertains to the Internet. Any teacher posting on the Internet should take the time to read this.
A Teacher’s Guide to Fair Use and Copyright
Another helpful guide to fair use and copyright, this one is specifically designed for teachers. It also includes a chart for fair use to post in your classroom.
Discovery Blogging Rules
An extensive set of rules for classroom blogging which includes clearly defined consequences to breaking the rules. This list can serve as a model for the rules in your classroom.

Multimedia Resources for Blogging:
Remember: The multimedia resources can be used with other multimedia projects, too.
Sound and Photo Conversion Sites:
Pain.Net freeware that helps you manipulate images to post on the blog or use in other applications.
Zamzar: a free online file conversions site. It converts images, documents, videos and other files from one format to another in order to post to the Blog

Audacity: a free cross platform sound editor and recorder especially useful for the Dells.
Audacity tutorials:
Audacity Quick Guide to get you started audacity
Remember that you can use the Audacity software for storytelling, too.
Audacity Tutorial for Podcasters: This is comprehensive, but broken down into easy sections.
http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm

You will need to download the LAME MP3 encoder from Audacity to change sound files to MP3 for the web.
1. Under “For Audacity on Windows”, left click on the link “libmp3lame-win-3.97.zip” and save the zip folder to anywhere on your computer.
2. When you have finished downloading the ZIP folder, unzip it and save the file lame_enc.dll that it contains to anywhere on your computer.

Voice Thread
This is an amazing tool that allows you and your students to make a presentation, put it online and comment on it. You can comment on a document as well. This embeds well into an Edublogs site.
Take a look at, What is Voice Thread? on their site to get a feeling for what this tool does.

AcidXpress is a free download from Sony that allows you to make your own music on a Dell.
Note: Sony has other options that cost money for those who want to do more with this software.
The Levelator is a free cross platform program that allows you to adjust the sound of downloaded loops, and effects. (Nice for both Dells and Macs)

Online Resources for Royalty Free Music and Sound Effects:
Four Bees has free sounds, graphics and more.
StoneWashed.net has free sound effects and loops that are identified as .wav or .mp3.
Royalty Free Music provides sound loops for podcasts and audio casts.
For more music go to http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/free-music-resources.html
Partners in Rhyme is a great site for all sorts of multimedia projects that need music from different genres. They have loops and sound effects as well.

Let me know how Blogging is working for you and your students. I’d love to link to some of your great Blog sites when you are ready.

Protecting Intellectual Property

Eric C. — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:05:56 +0000

Increasingly, students are becoming not just consumers of content but creators as well. This poses interesting challenges for teachers and librarians as we try to navigate the waters of intellectual property rights. What can students and teachers fairly use without permission and how can we protect what we create? Although not always clear, we were in somewhat familiar territory with fair use rules and content in the public domain. This became considerably more murky with the introduction of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now with an explosion of content on the web and the growing struggle over whether knowledge should be free or constrained for commercial use, it seems almost impossible to keep track of what is ok to use and what is not. For many the traditional bounds of copyright law did not fully address these issues. To help with this problem Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons which developed a new class of licensing. Creative Commons licensing is very clear in how content can be used consequently its use for digital content has exploded. Given these new forms of licensing, it is even more important that we understand the use rights for any piece of intellectual property we run across on the web and the implications for our students and teachers when they want to use them.

Fair Use

Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licensed Content

Feed Your Mind Flash Presentation

Eric M. — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:56:14 +0000

I created this presentation about blogs and RSS feed readers to present to the educational technologists from the Seattle Schools. You can view the movie here. The slideshow doesn’t show the full presention because I frequently navigated away from the flash movie to show examples of other web sites.

Use these keys to navigate through the movie;

Right arrow: move forward one slide
Left arrow: move backward one slide
Up arrow: replay animation of current slide
Down arrow: skip animation of current slide