blogging

**Digital Tools and Blogging in Education: Basic Skills Every Educator Needs to Master These New Tools for Use in the Classroom**= =**James Stanger, PhD**=

He had an experience with a complicated shower head and how to use it at luxury hotel. “You ought to blog that.” That’s how he started blogging.

He has a PhD in English.

Work in Open Source Community - written lots of books on Linux and Web Design.

Cool Digital Tools

Open Source Software - two kinds of definitions of free “freedom” and like “free beer.”

Virtual network computing ([|www.tightvnc.org]) - way of administering remote computers

Amaya ([|www.w3.org/Amaya]) - html editor

Firefox add-ons:

[|https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox)]

Firebug [|Firebug] Colorzilla [|Colorzilla]

DOM Inspector [|DOM Inspector]

Total Validator [|Total validator] Image Zoom [|Image Zoom]

Common Server Platforms

Content Managment Joomla ([|www.joomla.org]) Drupla ([|www.drupal.org]) Liferay ([|www.liferay.com]) Mambo ([|www.mamboserver.com])

Blogging Wordpress ([|www.wordpress.com]) Drupal ([|www.drupal.org]) Boing Boing ([|www.boingboing.net])

Types of Blogs Personal Political Corporate Educational

Technorati [|Technorati] slashdot.org [|Slashdot] arstechnica.com [|Ars Technica] pbs.org/cringely [|Cringley] dorak.org/blog [|Dorak.org] (If you want to get annoyed) scobleizer.com [|Robert Scoble] [|Scobleshow]

Jon Garfunkel cibiitie.net/people/JonGarfunkel

Common sense of decency about how to act on the net.

Some Big Names

Daily KOS (dailykos.com Weblog awards (weblogawards.org)

Educator’s Perspective

What’ so cool about blogging from educator’s perspective? Can engage students to think in a different way Some students think it’s cool. Blogging is a doing activity. Way of building community: Involves social networking, web design, even some development, some admin, and thinking about an audience. Useful even if you don’t care about IT or web design. Blogging how to do - get the technology going for you and your students.

Trol - is someone who is trying to get someone mad.

People worry about what “They” will think.

People feel self-conscious as a writer.

What kind of tone should you adopt? Some people adopt “Hipper than thou” because the geeks didn’t have anyone to dance with in high school. LOL!

Earnest Inquring Snarky

How do you get started?

Define your persona? - who you are the voice, the personality that you present to the world.

Identify your audience. Write about an event. Write like you talk. Use short, pithy sentences. Focus on one topic. Consider using a spell checker. Take the time to teach your students from expert examples. Leave them wanting more! Humor is your friend. But remember your audience.

Why is this important? Because people want to know that you represent an audience and that you have something important to say that represents that audience.

Make topic relevant to you Use clear headlines Create a biography - people want to know if you represent them Don’t think you need to get it right the first time. Draft. Employ referential writing. Link to other sites and blogs. Follow the same rules as news copy or e-zines. Create your own blog on a third-partty site and et the word out. Get a tudent to write in a blog and then use it as an example.

Good writing is honest writing Write about something you now and that exciting

rss feeds

Really Simple Syndication

Web 2.0?

He has written in a couple of O’Reilly’s books.

Long term blogging tips

Don’t focus too much on technology or about the writing

//Photo by [|kr7ysztof] from [|istockphoto.com]//