A Feed of Feeds or LIVE Blogroll?

I'm almost there! I have an English teacher who is interested in blogging with her English Composition students. FINALLY!

We have decided to use EduBlogs for their price and feature set. Here's where I'm not sure where to go.

The teacher intends to set up a class blog. She then intends to set up student blogs. Let's just say 100 students or so. Her question is, how do I monitor the student blogs? Must I visit 100 sites per day? No, of course not. We'll simply subscribe in our feed reader, right??

Well now I have 100 feeds to monitor. Here's my question. I would like to set up a feed of feeds for those 100 student blogs. I know this can be done. I've just never done it.

Better yet, I would like a dynamic blogroll with live feeds to each student blog. The "live" blogroll would be displayed in the class blog sidebar!! That's the mission, should you choose to accept it.

Now I know that YOU know a good solution. Please share.
Fingers are crossed that I'm just missing this feature.

Cloud Computing: Will Schools Play Along?

Check out the video concerning Dropbox that was recently highlighted on TechCrunch.

With tools like this Districts had better position themselves for bandwidth, bandwidth, and... yep, more bandwidth.

The more tools like Google Docs, Zoho, Flickr, etc. are storing stuff for you (a.k.a. cloud computing) the less storage space Districts should need, right?
Now this calls out questions about e-discovery rules, privacy, and security. You wouldn't want confidential files to accidentally get saved to your "cloud" like Dropbox.
Even deleting it doesn't delete it!

The possibilities are exciting, yet scary at the same time. I'd hate to be a technology director these days... oh wait!!!!

Google Apps Sites- No RSS Feeds

Unless I'm missing it the pages in Google Sites do not have RSS feeds. They have a "subscribe" feature but I don't see our friendly orange icon.

I'm hoping that this is a feature that is on the horizon.

I'd like to see a teacher be able to subscribe to her students "sites" to have a dashboard view of the updates.

Please clue me in if I'm missing it.

Google Apps for Education - Many Questions

Here at my District we are using Google Apps for Education as a small pilot. Our implementation is small and we've communicated with parents and students throughout the project.

The results are good and students/teachers are finding creative ways to use the web-based tools. The most popular activities are collaborative writing using Google Docs in Language Arts classes. Teachers are using the shared calendaring to coordinate their mobile laptop labs and more.

I have received frequent calls from school districts with questions about liability, AUP, filtering, monitoring, archiving, etc. I don't have all the answers. I do believe that we cannot wait until we have all the answers. Sometimes you forge ahead and improve and learn as you go.

In a recent announcement Google has added some monitoring, filtering, and archiving solutions for purchase. Yep, they're not free... yet.

I would be interested to know or be able to calculate the TCO of operating email/document services for thousands of students. Just maintaining email services for several hundred staff is a challenge given our current staffing levels. This task would increase our email service workload considerably if we did this in house.

I guess the biggest question is: how "private" is our email messaging if it's stored at Google? When it's in-house, I can always pull the plug.

This is VERY tempting, yet I have reservations. Ok, let's all agree to switch to Google for messaging/calendaring/document sharing!!! Uh, you go first! :)

PETE&C absolutely MUST change it´s name!

I am trying to follow the Pennsylvania Education Technology Expo and Conference from a distance. I am finding it very difficult to do! The ampersand (&) in the name appears to be problematic for technorati tag searches.

See the hitchhikr page on PETE&C! There is very little related to the conference! While some guy named Florida Pete has an interesting life, it is not exactly what I´m after.
(You do follow conference events with hitchhikr.com, don´t you?)

Compare the results of the PETE&C tag search with the recent METC tag search. No comparison.

Tagging is a wonderful way to share the photos, videos, live blogging, ustreams, and more. Well, I guess I will wait until my colleagues return to get the scoop.

Please, Pennsylvania, get rid of that ampersand and let the sharing begin.
At least I *think* that is the problem. Anyone else have ideas on what the problem could be?

Dear M$, Please don't cripple these tools!

I see that Microsoft is now in talks to acquire Ustream.tv. This following their bid to acquire Yahoo.

From a purely selfish standpoint I sit here hoping that Microsoft doesn't cripple Flickr and Ustream for non-Microsoft browsers. Today these services seem to be platform agnostic.

I'm not an open source purist but I do tend to use FOSS whenever I have a choice. I just have to wonder if Microsoft will develop these tools ignoring the "10 percenters"?

Are you concerned?

Web-based Time Lines

A common learning activity in our social studies classrooms is the creation of a time line. Time lines help students to frame an event or concept in terms of chronological events.

I think we've all been asked to create one at some time in our education.

A very simple tool that I'd like to share is CircaVie.

Like many sites it requires a free account. This particular service requires an AIM account. This could be problematic for some schools who filter tightly.

The time line creator is really rather easy. It allows one to populate the time line with Flickr photos (or any online photo for that matter.) Remember to cite properly! Text entries can become events. Even YouTube videos can be included.

It would make an outstanding project for students to create a CLASS time line where each group populates a series of major events complete with photos and videos. WOW!

When the time line is complete, in true Web 2.0 fashion you may share your new resource by embedding into your wiki or blog. See a non-sense sample below. Be sure to use the <<>> buttons to move horizontally.