A perfect example of how a teacher may utilise a blog for communication with students, parents and even ex-students can be found at Mr Wright’s Class.
In it he has everything from spelling words to pictures of field trips to appeal for parents help. By keeping an account of assignments, events etc, parents are kept informed of the happenings in class. This is a great way for communication. Go take a look.
Bloglines.com – for monitoring of (blog) site updates
To stay informed whenever a site updates its information, subscribe to its RSS feeds using Bloglines.com.
If you need some help on bloglines.com, a quick guide of bloglines.com has been created by Alex Halavais.
RSS , Getting started
Will Richardson in his article Getting Started with RSS urged all to take up this great teaching tool.
RSS, short for Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is seen being used more and more widely. Besides searching a site for an orange XML button for its feed, another more convenient way is to switch to the newly released Firefox browser (assuming you are using Internet Explorer). Whenever you surf to a site providing RSS feed, Firefox will indicate to you with an orange RSS tag at the right-hand bottom corner of the window.
Webnote – Online Note-taking Tool
Another online tool that allows you to instantly cut-n-paste any information from anywhere (www, working documnets etc). As pointed out by Will Richardson in his article, it is a great collaborative tool!
Some features:
1. Anytime, anywhere, anyone (who knows the name or url)
2. Hassle free: No username, no password to remember!
2. Notes can be saved and retrieved in future.
3. Get notified of new notes posted thru RSS feeds
Take a look at my sample note or create your own now! 🙂
The NMC 2004 Horizon Report
The New Media Consortium (NMC) has published the above report which highlights six technologies with the underlying research suggesting these technologies will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.
Take a dip at current and future development here.