What now? What can you do with it? How could it be useful in Teaching and Learning?

I’d like to invite any teachers reading this blog to comment on how they use there blog, why is a blog classed as a Social Networking tool? How can it be used with a class?

I use my blog to share my e-Learning/ New Technology learning and development with colleagues and family. It’s both a personal and professional space.

So how can a blog be useful for networking?

Here’s an example;

Yesterday a teacher within North Coast Institute contacted me and happened to mention that she read my blog and I was really thrilled.

Kaz Madigan has her own blog, which I hadn’t seen before and it’s wonderful. Now I have seen it, and we have talked about our blogs and have made a connection and are looking forward to meeting each other.

But that’s just the start…

I have since sent her blog to a couple of other teachers that have similar interests, work in the same area or a similar interest in web tools. I am hoping they might post a comment on her blog, or contact her and connect.

For me, the power of blogging is making connections. Connecting with like minded people in this way, you are able to develop a strong collaborative relationship virtually, an element of trust follows.

If you haven’t already met face to face, one day you might and the relationship strengthens further, as resources, learning, and experiences are shared. Through these people and their online spaces, you meet others and a strong network of ‘trusted’ friends blooms.

In Task 1, you created a blog. You refined your profile, in Task 2 – your About page. Now you are ready to experience the power of blogging. But, as always, to get something out of it, you need to put something in, so here it is, Task 3.

Task 3: Comment on someone else’s Blog

This challenge is about going on a blog hunt to find like minded people with a blog. Add a comment on to their blog and start a conversation.

There is a list of your team/colleague blogs already in the comments section of Task 1. You could also search for a blog relative to your faculty or area of interest. It’s up to you, but please take the time to make a comment, you’d be amazed by how much it’s appreciated and you’ll probably get a response back fairly quickly.

I know this challenge might seem pretty basic, but many successful blogs have been built on the back of these types of conversations and the task is worth getting your teeth into.

Tip: RSS Aggregator…

I can’t really imagine life before netvibes; managing all those blogs and wiki’s through an RSS Aggregator makes life so much easier. You can subscribe to the RSS feed on a blog to automatically keep following the conversation and posts.

Next week, in our Technology sessions, we’ll revisit RSS and their use to save you time!

Good luck and happy commenting!

Watch this movie now!

*Special thanks to Des Osborn for pointing out this movie after a recent Elluminate Session… e-Tools ‘n Tips

There a few more of these “in Plain English” videos by Lee LeFever at CommonCraft

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Wiki’s in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English

There has been a lot of interest in RSS lately. What is RSS, how can it help you and save you time? If the movie above wasn’t enough, then check out some of the links below…

Looking at my blog statistics and reader clicks, the RSS information seems to be the most popular, so here is a list of posts and resources from the archives;

• Netvibes Vs Google Reader – Aug 14th
• Alex’s demonstration of netvibes – August 13th
  
• Netvibes ‘How To’ – June 14th
• RSS in education - April 18th

Other good RSS feed readers;

• netvibes – this site is really cool. Your feeds are loaded into pods that you can click and drag around your homepage. You can also add To-Do lists, weather, search engines, calendars (very Mac friendly), video searches, and more…
• pageflakes - here’s another site you can personalise with your favorite news, weather, sports, entertainment, photos, videos, music, email…and much more, all in one place!
• bloglines – another useful site that once you have an account, you can add RSS feeds… I find this hard to use in comparison to netvibes and pageflakes

Do you get the vibe?

First of all, thanks to Sue Waters for posting an introduction of everyone that’s participating in the 31 Day Blogging Challenge created by Darren Rowse. It’s a great way to find out about everyone involved.

Sue, I think you’ve really started something with this netvibes Vs GoogleReader thing with the comments on your post;

“Alex from Miller’s Spin (Australia) may well cause me to be banned from Google forever. Her great screencast of how she uses Netvibes to subscribe to blogs has convinced a lot of bloggers not only to try Netvibes but also to give Jing a go. Which I did – and here is my quick screecast of how I use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs!” Sue Waters

I liked the jing movie you created and have linked to above, it was very informative. I love that GoogleReader let’s you view the blog posts on that one page, that makes life easy! As RSS feed readers go, both netvibes and Google Reader actually do very similar things (I also use iGoogle), but I do find netvibes a little prettier (much like Mac vs Windows) and has more ‘theme’ customisation options. I also love that you can drag pods over the tabs to drop them into different pages.

It’s also good to see everyone getting into jing.

Also, thanks to Kate Quinn from Waxlyrical (Australia) (also loving Netvibes) for setting up a netvibes page to follow our 31 Day Blog challenges. I updated this yesterday – click the button to add this to your Netvibes page.

Facebook Meet Netvibes: Netvibes Introduces the Facebook Widget

I know I’ve mentioned netvibes before, but the new features really are amazing!

New to RSS?
For those of you who need a primer, have a look at this post about RSS. After that, you can have a look at the RSS Session in my wikispace.

The best thing about the new features?
Apart from the new themes, wallpapers and cool customisation choices, you can really extend the capability of the Tabs by sharing them. You can now set up a page of links/ feeds/ resource that is conten/ topic specific and share it with your students/ colleagues. A VERY HANDY way to share links & resources from one spot!

What?
If you’ve created an account and explored netvibes before now, you will know that you can sort and place all of the information/ RSS feeds you subscribe to on the Internet (that is, all those blogs, wiki’s, news and resource sites) into the one spot. Let’s investigate…

Cool New Feature 1. Share Your Tabs!
Imagine setting up a page of RSS feeds to a selection of resources for a special class… sounds good huh? Well not only can you set it up very easily, you can share that page with an entire class. Have a look at the images below for an example of what you can do.

Cool New Feature 2. Customisation Heaven! Have a look at the new galleries of wallpapers and themes that are available. One of the most beautiful blogs I read now has a netvibes theme (This is the blog – Veerle if you’re interested)!

Click below to view larger images

Cool Old Features:

• Drag ‘n Drop pods – click and drag the pods around , AND drag them to anoter Tab!
• Colour schemes
• Add content from your favourite sites
• Add content from their feed directory
• Add a To-Do List pod
• Add a local weather pod
• Add a web-note pod (place notes & web links here)
• Add your del.icio.us bookmarks
• Add a Web Search pod
• Add an Image Search pod
• Add a Video Search pod

Get netvibed today!

netvibes blog/ help/ gallery

Share my Technology in Education netvibes tab –