Hi.
I don't reallly get how to do this but we have good blogging software at
our school. Is there instructions?
Malcolm

DECS NLT

DECS NLT
I am still a bit mystified concerning blogs. They appear to offer a great unedited forum for like minded people but only one person I know actually uses them!
His comment on them is that they are good fun until someone takes something that you wrote negatively. Then guilt frustration resentment all come to the party (I’ll cry if I want to type thing)
I think I’d end up being a spectator rather than contributor which sort of defeats the purpose I guess.

I don’t think I’d recommend blogs to my primary students but have discussed them with my son (senior school) who thinks they are cool!
Phil

Finally

Took a while because it is not immediately obvious how you post.
I am a secondary teacher and many of my students have blogs etc already, but they tend to regard them as their territory and think old people can't use these tools, let alone they could be useful for more formal learning. As such they tend to use them carelessly and in some cases inappropriately. We need to teach them responsible and appropriate ways of using same.
As educators I don't think we have a choice about adopting and legitimising new forms of communication, at least not until we retire.
PS Very much enjoyed the course, but I needed it to be 3 months not 3 weeks long.
Al Wiese

At last!

I feel quite silly. I've been here a couple of times, but never managed to post. All I was able to do was comment on someone else's post. I just wasn't reading all the instructions, and was linking directly to the page instead of first logging into the blogger site. All fixed now. And I have a blogger account! I should know better.
I still struggle to find uses for a blog site with kids. Finding a site that is accessible at school is the first problem, and then having a real purpose rather than trying to invent one. I've thought about it a lot, but still haven't come up with a real reason. I'd love to hear from someone who had moved beyond this and uses one effectively.
Sue

Blogging

Although I consider myself to be quite "technologically compentent", I'm not one to jump into new technologies early. My wife and I only started blogging a couple of years ago, mainly as a way to keep family members informed with developments on the baby front.

I frequently read a number of ICT related blogs, including:

• Planet Gnome
• Ubuntu Blog
• The Fridge
• Mark's Sysinternals Blog
  

Chris Goerner

New Technologies Course Week 2

Hi everyone.

Thanks for an entertaining first week. It was good to see people helping each other out in the Forum and Wiki. Congrats to Paul on being the only person who managed to post to the class blog at http://decs-nlt.blogspot.com/ - with an audio post to boot. I don't need to know why you didn't post to the blog - it may be lack of time, lack of relevance, it was too difficult, etc - but it remains there if you'd like to use it.

WIKI DISCUSSION

There's a lot of valuable information in there. I was thinking I really posed the wrong question for that activity. I think what the task I posed - What do you think of this tool? Can you see it being useful in your teaching or training? - was more suited to a forum. A better goal would have been to Create a document that describes how wikis can be useful for teaching and learning. That way we'd have a final usable resource rather than 'just' a collection of opinions. Such a resource could still be created from the data that's there now, but would require someone to put in about an hour's work. Of course the facilitator could do it, and if this was a course on efacilitation I would model just that, but I'd like to offer the task to anyone who sees it as a useful activity for them. :-)

THIS WEEK - SYNCHRONOUS TOOLS

Activities for this week are to:

• read the resources listed under this section (topic 2)
• participate in the two optional live sessions on Monday night and Friday morning.

  Monday night, Aug 14th  8.00 pm (Elluminate) - http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=235631

  Friday morning, Aug 18th 10.30 am (Centra) - URL to be advised

• if anyone would like to initiate an asynchronous discussion in a voice based asynchronous environment go over to http://wimba.netspot.com.au/wimba/board?action=display&rid=687-1155470758763 , enter a screen name and contribute your spoken thoughts to the board, Can I suggest that if you aren't able to attend one of the synchronous sessions that you try and add your thoughts to this voice board so we have the chance to hear all your voices in synch or asynch mode.
• I've also added a good old standard text forum to Topic 2 if you'd like to add comment there in text on the use of synchronous tools

Enjoy the week. See some of you tomorrow (Monday) night in Elluminate at http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=235631 (Remember - you may have to join LearningTimes first before you can enter the Elluminate virtual classroom.)

One last thing - I am cc'ing this to the email address web_tools.DECS@blogger.com so it should appear as a blog post at http://decs-nlt.blogspot.com/ You might like to try the same trick! ;-)

- Michael
 

Michael Coghlan
eLearning Facilitator
TAFE SA
e: michaelc@chariot.net.au
m: 0417 899 912

Michael Replies to Paul

Paul's first voice blog

Word to Blogger Toolbar

There is another great and easy way to post to your blog hosted by Blogger. You can compose your posts in Word and send them directly to your blog from Word. If you'd like to try it download the Word to Blogger toolbar HERE.

Test Post via Email

Hi again.

This is a test to see if the email to Blogger function is working.

To email direct to our blog send a message to web_tools.DECS@blogger.com

- Michael

Audio Welcome via Telephone

Welcome

We will use this blog to experiment during our DECS short course on Web Tools (New Learning Technologies).