WHS Project: Technology

Our Project Tech workshop this last week focused on wikis and blogs.

Edublogs.org is a site we are all beginning to use to create a blog for professional use or for student use.   Even corporations are starting to use blogs–Amazon books has one, for example.    Think about a blog like a diary of topics where you create the topic for discussion that others can respond to.

Or you can have a blog that is just informational for your subject area, and you don’t have to allow comments. 

For an educational blog, you will probably want to moderate the comments, which means comments are emailed to you and then you approve them.  Edublogs does have this set up as the default.

You may also want to change the design of the blog.  This is done under the Presentation button in the administrative section of the site.  It’s easy to change the look and feel of your blog to something appealing for your subject by just  clicking on the design you’d like.

To write a post, use the “Write” section, and to manage your previous posts or others’ comments, use the “Manage” section.  

You may also want to set up your own blogroll for students of other sites you recommend they use or read.  Use the “blogroll” button, then click “add” to add links to websites of your choice.  These will display in your sidebar.

We also talked about using Wikis in the workshop.   A wiki is a site that all users on the site can edit.  You can create sidebar pages, and have different groups of students collect and add the information there.   This works best on pbwiki since only one user at a time can edit each page. 

 There are many different wiki sites like wikispaces and pbwiki (peanut butter wiki).  I have tips for using pbwiki.com on a wiki that I created if you would like help!   The wiki is brightworkshop.pbwiki.com.  (click on the sidebar to see the tips)

You can use a wiki in a year long effort to collect information for your course, use it for a committee to share and edit documents(you can password your wiki so only certain users can get into it), or use it for a review site for a final, etc.   Corporations like Ebay are using wikis to have users create their manual for them.  

Both these tools have so many uses for education!  Share ideas you have here, or if you are using them, we’d like to hear what you are doing!

Carolyn