blog | E-verything!

Introduction

This session was a sharing of ideas about blogging with students (recording here). As is often the case we used a mix of audio, text and whiteboards so catch the recording for the full flavor!.

The session

We started as usual with deciding a topic and the consensus (by poll as usual) was to talk about blogging with students. We talked briefly about some of the pros and cons of student blogging.

Then we moved on to look at how we might manage blogging for students, touching on a range of issues including: deciding whether to use class or individual student blogs; managing/moderating content; safety for the students; the need for guidelines for students; and the possibilities opened up by joining activities such as Sue Wyatt’s (@tasteach) Global Blogging Challenge

Conclusion

Blogging with students is a huge topic with so many facets that it was impossible to do more than brush the surface of some aspects in one session, but we certainly enjoyed trying! Most of the areas we touched on would justify a full session to themselves!

Next Week

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus!” session a “Techie How To” – “Imagine Your Image” an interactive session in which we invite you to explore with us a simple to use, free image editor (Photofiltre). Ninety nine times out of a hundred when I or my students need to edit an image we just need to do something simple and don’t need advanced features such as layers. For example we mostly just need cropping, resizing, adding labels or simple image enhancements. So when I construct a simple “how to”, modify an image for my blog or for use in a learning resource I use Photofiltre.

Join us on Thursday July 1^stat 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 2^nd at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

This week’s recorded Edublogs Webinar was presented by guest speaker Sue Wyatt aka tasteach. Sue describes herself as “a nearly retired teacher bringing the world of web 2.0 into her classroom”. It would be fair to say that through her Blogging Challenge she has brought the world of web 2.0 into many classrooms around the world! The challenge began with about 500 students from 8 countries and has now developed to over 3000 students from 15 countries. Beginner bloggers, veteran bloggers, commenters and classes take part. Each week a new activity is posted and teachers may use as they wish in their classroom and hopefully link back to the original post.

As usual we had global participation and as usual this and the great subject gave rise to a lively session with a very “busy” text chat throughout as well as the polls and whiteboard interaction. Sue told us how she started blogging herself and then very soon progressed to blogging with her students, and then how the whole challenge went global with the invaluable help and support of Sue Waters.

In the next part of the session Sue took us on a Web Tour giving us a look at a variety of blogs that have been part of the challenge over the last two years and showing how the Challenge as developed and grown to encompass so many participants.

Finally Sue gave us a “heads up” on the Challenge due to start in early March – registration forms will be available for you to register your class and/or individual students from tomorrow (Sunday 31^st January 2010) on “Challenge Yourself to Blog”. In preparation for the new Challenge Sue Waters is writing a series of posts (the first is on creating a class blog) on the activities that are useful to do in advance tof taking part in the Challenge. As usual these are full of excellent advice and are a great read whether you plan to take part in the Challenge or not.

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes

Thursday February 4^th at 23:00 GMT (6pm USA EST, Midnight CET) or Friday February 5^th at 7am West Aus, 10am NSW. Join us here in Elluminate as usual – look forward to “seeing” you!