Thursday, February 28, 2008

RRS Feeds

I finally got my RRS reader up and running. It was easier than I thought but took awhile to get everyone's feeds entered. I can't get the Class Blogmeister feeds to register, not even my own. At first I thought that it was just that I hadn't enabled the RRS on my blog so I went in and did that but still no luck. Any suggestions? I also added my school blog to our Wiki and was impressed that I remembered how. If you would like to check it out even if you can't put it in your reader you can see it at
Blogging at Unity Public School
I sure hope it is RRS and not RSS. Since I don't know what it stands for exactly I'm guessing here! ;)

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Showcase Reflections


I went to two great sessions at our Showcase 2008. The first was Dean Shareski's session "Are You Published?" in which he gave us many great suggestions on sites to try and ways to publish your or your students' thoughts. His wiki has a lot of neat links.
Here is Dean presenting:

The second was Ev Sillers session "Integrating Technology with a Focus on Digital Story Telling and Blogging." This session, even though the presenter encountered 'technical difficulties';) was awesome. She went through how to use several sites, including Voice Thread, and focused on Photo Story 3. She gave us some examples of digital stories which can be viewed at DigiTales. I already have a few ideas on how to use this with several of my classes before the end of the year.

Something else which sprang from a discussion at my table after/during Dean's presentation was that it is sometimes frustrating not to have a curriculum or scope and sequence from which to work when teaching 'Computers.' We all felt it would be difficult to maintain a scope and sequence because things change so quickly in this field and then we said "We should have a Scope and Sequence Wiki to which we could all post what we are doing at different grade levels." Things to think about!

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Blogging at School

Well, I'm trying to get more students blogging so the grade 2 teacher and I set up a site for her class at www.classblogmeister.com. At first it seemed to be going fine but then all of her students disappeared so I re-entered them. The students started to set up their pages and then I had extra students, as orphans, so I added them to the class. Then I had student's names come up twice. I also lost most of the student's info that they had inputted. So I then re-entered some info and deleted one of the two names. Now I have some students listed with everything working and I have some students who are just dots on the class list and your can't access anything. The "dot students" do come up on the class roster in the edit section. So I'm thinking of deleting the whole thing and starting from scratch but who maybe I'll have an inspiration on how to fix the whole thing. On the other hand my own class blog works fine, although I haven't touched it since before Christmas. I'm sort of worried to try now because they've added a new approval tool which I think may be part of the problem. Ah the learning curve of technology!