edna.edu.au

SDD follow-up & my thoughts on aggregating all our excellent content

Yesterday's PD session was great.  I love the little Captivate thing I did - I really want to finish it.  I wonder if they will end up on the website?

Today I spent a little bit of time thinking about something that has been on my mind for a while - email vs RSS.  I think for the centre we need the following:

• The option to subscribe to 'everything macict' posted on the web via email or rss.  Particularly for reporting etc this would be useful.
• The option to subscribe to 'important macict' stuff posted on the web via email or rss.  This is useful for helping teachers and staff understand and help each other in their projects.
  

I found what I think is an excellent solution:

• MailChimp - will automatically send an email with your content in it to a distribution list.
  
• Chimp Feeder - will mash-up lots of different content from the web and create a single rss
  

The benefits include a 1 time set-up process, stats on emails, legislative stuff like unsubscribe - all for free.  The disadvantage is that you can add text to the email so you would need to either send a seperate 'news - newsletter' or write a blog post and post that at just the right time so that it would appear as the first item in the email.

Also a few points to think about in terms of our use of online tools for professional development:

• Me.edu.au is designed to have only your content & RSS feeds - not content from all over the web - this makes it easier for people who are interested in you to see exactly what you're up to.
• Do we need to aggregate all the content that is being tagged by MacICT people from all places eg wikis, blogs, social bookmarks etc?  Do we need to be able to subscribe to a 'tag' for the projects individual or more for types of content eg wiki, blogs, social bookmarks???
• How can we denote the urgency and importance of certain dates, blog posts, resources??  A different tag - aggregated in a different way.

Tags: communications me.edu.au rss sociallearning macict aggregation
Posted at 05:32PM Jul 29, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[4]

A Local Connection

Martin Pluss is a great source of professional development for me.  I used to follow him in Twitter and read his blog occassionally but now that I'm using me.edu.au more often I find that I'm find more information from him because I can see his blogs, rss feeds and more.  Anyway he explains very eloquently how he uses me.edu.au.  Click here see how to add rss feeds to your profile to provide a rich source of information sharing.

Tags: community me.edu.au rss
Posted at 10:31PM Nov 03, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Information & Technology Planning For Schools

School Processes

Questions you might be looking to answer:

• Where is the sports equipment is kept?
• How do I use Movie Maker?
• How do I feed the worms?
  

Where you should look for the answer:

• In the school wiki.  You can use Wikispaces as a starting point.  Here is an example I have started for my teaching practices.
  
• Include RSS feeds of any teacher/student del.icio.us tags, blogs or other communities to orient new students and teachers to the type of information being collected on the web.
  

Lesson Ideas & General Teaching Chat

Questions you might be looking to answer:

• What are the best links for the Olympics unit we are doing?
• Has anyone found a cool activity for the Olympics?
• What activities don't work?

Where you should look for the answer:

• Edna communities of interest are a great place to start.  Set-up a community of interest on a topic or for your school.  This way you can have casual conversations, easily add links. 
  
• If you create a school community of interest you can add this feed to your RSS reader.
  

Student Work

Questions you might be looking to answer:

• What are the students learning about right now?
• What are the students interested in right now?
• Can I see some examples of student works?
  

Where you should look for the answer:

• Classblogs.  You can get started by using Edublogs.  They now include Edublogs.tv which makes it easier to post lots of different types of media.

Links

Questions you might be looking to answer:

• What websites are students looking at?
  
• What websites are teachers looking at?
  

Where you should look for the answer:

• Teachers can add resource links to the me.edu.au community.
  
• The easiest way to get students sharing links might be to put a links page on the blog.
  

Bringing it all together

Questions you might be looking to answer:

• What is everyone up to right now?
• Has anyone in my community changed anything?
  

Where you should look for the answer:

• Your RSS reader.  FeedDemon is very easy to use and it's a desktop application so the news comes to you.
• Feeds to add include - me.edu.au communities of interest, wikispaces updates, delicious links by tag and any blogs you follow.
  

Tags: processes showme technology tags rss
Posted at 12:15PM Aug 09, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[2]