Blog Resources

1-Question Interview--Index Page
ProBlogger Darren Rowse "asked 14 of {his} favorite bloggers what they’d do differently if they were starting their blog again today. Their responses were varied" and are available on the index page linked above.

50 Great Widgets for Your Blog
Helpful, fun, and/or sexy additions for your blog: painter-a-day service, world timeclocks, etc.

Blogs in Plain EnglishA YouTube video demystifying blogs.

CreativeCommons
Free artwork, music, and tools.

The Cutest Blog on the Block
Free backgrounds, banners, and extras for personalizing blogs as well as secrets and tips from experienced blognuts.

EduBlogs
This free blogging platform bills itself as "the largest education community on the Internet."

Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers
ProBlogger Darren Rowse lists his readers' responses to the one-question interview he posed to "14 of {his} favorite bloggers."

Feed2Podcast.com
The dotcom makes me think that this product probably isn't free, but it enables bloggers to have people listen to their blogs rather than just reading them. It may prove useful.

MediaMaster
MM bills itself as "the best music experience on the web for accessing, listening and sharing your music collection." It allows you to upload your music and/or radio station to your blog so that you or others may listen to selections from your collection anywhere you can get an Internet collection. This one looks like a feebie to me.

MyStudiyo
Online software for creating quizzes to post on /embed in blogs and websites.

One Hundred Excellent Free WordPress Themes
I like what's in this name.


Our Blog Templates
Beautiful and free templates to download for use with Blogger blogs.

PodCast
The site bills itself as "the largest podcast collection on the web." "Find, play, and share audio and video podcasts from all over the world on Podcast.com and access them on any mobile device. "

Support Blogging
As "an opportunity for students, teachers, administrators, parents, and others to help promote an understanding of the benefits of educational blogging," SupportBlogging! is an invaluable resource offering linked lists of blogs, bloggers, and blog builders.

Warlick, David F. Classroom Blogging. 2^nd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press, 2007.
This book provides practical, step-by-step advice for teachers about using free web services to establish blogs, wikis and podcasts for classroom use. Warlick’s Blog, Exactly 2 Cents Worth, http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/ has many links to help teachers explore reading / writing / multimedia publishing options available on the web. Among these is http://supportblogging.com/Educational+Blogging

Why Let Our Students Blog?
A YouTube Video by Teachers for Teachers

Wordle
"Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. "

WordPress
Free blogs and blogging help.

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BlogLog: Reading Blogs

Please consider the following questions as you examine blogs from the four categories below--pedagogical, professional, personal, and educators on--whose titles or topics catch your eye.

1. What is the blog's purpose? How does the blogger communicate her purpose? How well does the blog communicate its purpose?
2. Does the blog address or target a particular audience? If so, how? How might you describe a representative audience member?
3. In what ways does the blog engage the reader visually?
4. What elements are present? For example, are there links, video clips, photographic images, graphic images, text, etc.? How do these elements help communicate a message?
5. Does the blog elicit response? If so, how and/or what kinds of response are evident? To what extent are readers invited to participate: to comment or to post?
6. What can you learn from the blog's title and URL?

Personal

• Meer Image: Fine Art Rubber Stamps
• Sightings: Steller's Jays
• Delicious Baby: Living the Good Life with Kids
• Thinking out Loud: Recycling Life into Art
• Cleo and Me

Professional

• Adjunct Central: Career and Pedagogical Advice for Part-Time/Temporary College Faculty
• Bright Moments: The Blog of the Redwood Jazz Alliance
• CommonThreads in NYC: A Conference Presentation Blog
• Lead by Example: Brandi Caldwell's Consultant Page
• Monaco Restoration Project Blog
• Polar Science 2006 (Edublog Award Winning site in which students interact with field scientists in Antarctica.)
• Practicing Technology Step by Step: The ATI2007 Yearbook
• RWP's Advanced Technology Institute 2007
• Western Massachusetts Writing Project Online Newsletter
• WNYC Radio
• Writing with Technology: A TC's Digital Image Class Blog

Pedagogical

• Macbeth FaceSpace: A Place for Macbeth and His Friends and/or Enemies to Meet
• Mrs. Wagner's Kindergarten Blog (Documentation of the Kindergarten year with lots of photo essays and information for parents about what students are learning.)
• Mrs. Perry's Fourth-Grade Blog (Provides lots of ideas about how to use a blog in a fourth grade classroom—The blog ends in May of 2006.)
• Steve Catton's Room Five Site (Okay, so this is really a website, but it does offer nice examples of how to publish student work and inform parents about what is going on at school.)
• Mr. Watson's Class Pages (An Technology/English teacher structures course assignments and student responses in a blog with lots of links to explore.)
• Holly's Year 7 School Work Blog (An Auckland student records her 2007-2008 school work.)
• Academy World English and History Blog
• BaxterBlog LHS: February 2007 (A high school teacher’s blog that includes short story podcasts by students as well as writing prompts and students’ responses.)
• Building Bridges: Peninsula School's Digital Storytelling Blog
• Critical Writing Text Review Central
• Derek McCoy's Critical Writing Internship Blog
• EHS AP Lit: Recent Assignments
• Harriet Watson's Digital Storytelling Blog
• Integrated English Recent Assignments
• English 758A: Inscribing Media
• Organic Chemistry
• Blog Journal Assignment

Educators on Blogging in Education

• The Tech Savvy Educator
• Blog of Proximal Development (An exploration of blogging communities in education.)
• Bud the Teacher: Inquiry and Reflection for Better Teaching
• Classroom Displays (Ideas, best practices, and celebrations of classroom displays world wide.)
• EdTech Journies (by teachers for teachers)
• EdTech Gold Rush (Resources addressing "educational technology, information literacy, low threshold and open source applications, and implementation in the K-12 classroom.")
• Teachers Teaching Teachers (A weekly webcast repository hosted by the National Writing Project's savviest techie.)
• Weblogg-ed (Will Richardson’s blog on applications for technology in K-12 classrooms.)
• WordPress Repair Kit (Education Fact and Fiction)
• Moving at the Speed of Creativity (Wesley Fryer advocates for the use of technology in the “learning revolution.”)
• Megan's Blog Desk (The blog is a resource for teachers who are interested in blogging. It has links to many examples and is set up as a workshop for teaching teachers.)
• Two Writing Teachers: Teaching Kids. Catching Minds. 872 Miles Apart.
• EduBlog Insights (Anne Davis' "comments, reflections, and occasional brainstorms" from the University of Georgia)

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Reading about Blogs

Please read one or more of the following "locations":

• SupportBlogging.com
  
• "1-Question Interview"
  
• "Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers"
  
• Creative Commons' "Blogs in Plain English" (if you have headphones)
  

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Assignment Directions

Narrative Assignment: Choose an image (or a few images) and use your imagination to create a short narrative that either explains the image or can accompany it in some other way. Try to address the who, what, where, when, and why in your narrative.

Ad Analysis Assignment: Choose one of the advertisements and address the following questions in a short analysis: What exactly about the style or design of the ad is different, innovative, and eye catching? What is being sold and what is the implied "sales pitch"? Which cultural values are reflected in the ad?

Instructions for Getting Started:

1. Images to use for assignments can be found at Narrative Images or Ad Images, or in files with the same name at this lab's shared drive (the S drive). If the S drive is not working, images also can be sent to you as email attachments.

2. To begin, select an image (save to desktop as necessary), and then compose your narrative or analysis (use a notepad or word processing program).

3. To create your Voicethread, select the "Create" tab at Voicethread. Then browse, find your image, and upload it to Voicethread.

4. Next, record your commentary for each image with the "Comment" button, preview, and save your Voicethread.

5. The last step is to share your Voicethread with other people. You can invite others to view your Voicethread by entering them each as a separate contact (you will need an email address for each person to invite). Or, you can copy and paste a link to your Voicethread into an email and send to the entire group (use "reply all" option).

Short Example:

Nicolette's McDonald's

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Workshop Presenter Tracy Duckart

Tracy Duckart has been a grateful devotee of the Redwood Writing Project since her first Invitational Summer Institute in 1996, and she eagerly accepted the opportunity to serve as its Technology Programs Director in 2000. Tracy teaches undergraduate composition at Humboldt State University and serves as the English Department's Director of Composition. 






Please visit the following links for a sampling of Tracy's technology projects:

• The Cache: Tracy Duckart's Instructional Website at Humboldt State University
• The Redwood Writing Project Website
• Advancing Technology 2009
• Critical Writing Text Review Central: A Student Project
  
• CommonThreads in NYC: A National Conference Presentation Blog
• CompPort

Contact Tracy at tracy.duckart@humboldt.edu or 707.826.5958.

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03.10.10 WordPress Blogs

About Blogs, Blogger, WordPress, and this Workshop

This TechMatters 2010 series blog has been created using Blogger, a friendly, accessible, easily customized platform for building blogs. Unfortunately, Blogger is also a limited platform. That is why this workshop covers another, more sophisticated platform: WordPress.

I still like Blogger, and because it is still the perfect tool for so many jobs, I still use it. But when I need something beefy, something that can both pirouette and annihilate, I turn to WordPress.

For the purposes of practicing what I preach and of increasing the speed at which this platform becomes familiar, this WordPress Blogs workshop will be presented via WordPress. Please follow this link to get there: http://rwpblogs.wordpress.com/.

At the end of our time together this evening, you are welcome to complete the Participant Feedback: Online Survey from this link, of course. And if you would really prefer to work with Blogger over WordPress, please visit RWP's Advanced Technology Institute 2009 resources for how-to-build and where-to-go directions at http://ati2009.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-use-blogger.html or (for a printer-friendly, downloadable version of same) at http://www.humboldt.edu/~rwp/BloggerDirectionsATI2009.pdf.

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