I’ve played a bit more with coComment nice touches are the RSS feeds of your comments and a JavaScript to include your comments on a blog or web page. The RSS seems a bit quicker than the javascript at the moment.
coComment doesn’t seem to work on Manila blogs or Ewan’s although TypePad is supposed to be supported.
Once the speed and support for loads of blogs is worked out this could be a real timesaver.
testing http://www.cocomment.com/ which looks like a very nice idea.
Worked better on a blogger test
Later in February I am going along with a colleague form School to our partner school in the Netherlands: De Rank.
I am hoping to get them to record a podcast which we will publish on our site, in fact two podcasts. De Rank is a school on two sites Assendelft and Westzaan.
Of course I don’t speak any Dutch but the teachers there speak pretty good English, so I think we will get by. I’ve started by blogging some instructions on the Sandaig – De Rank blog here: Sandaig Teachers visit .
I hope to enthuse the De Rank children about blogging too, and to blog the trip for the sandaig children to read.
Some children in primary six have just finished a small project with Comic Life. Back To the Victorian Times using photos taken on our trip to Scotland Street School Museum.
The children really loved Comic Life. I wish we had more copies. It takes all the difficulty in creating a beautiful comic strip leaving them to think about what to show and stay. We made the simplest comic possible, Comic Life. has lots more features and possibilities.
Playing with scotedublogs a bit, and I noticed there are some nice rss feeds avalible, for example Changes and comments on scotedublogs.
Looks like there some other nice thing, I am off to the sandbox.
The only things that might hinder using wikispaces in class are the google adds on every page and perhaps websense.
I wonder if there is a simple php wiki that doesn’t need a database?
Update
Just websense to test tomorrow.
Ewan has set up a scotedublogs wiki. Its aim is to create a directory of all the Scottish educational blogs that have been started.
Sounds good, I’ve added this blog and Sandaig Otters.
Following a post by Tim Lauer (who is manages to come up with wonderful stuff and ideas to use it in the class every week) Scuttle: Open Source Social Bookmarking Tool I found ScuttlEDU and finally a trackback to EduBlog Insights by Anne Davis from August last year, where she describes herself as scattered, covered & smothered by choice of web 2.0 fish to fry. I know who she feels, this post a is pretty pointless Friday one, except those links which are well worth following.
A short time ago I blogged about BubbleShare and wondered if it would get passed websense in school.
Well it did, I got interested and started thinking and then WebSense caught up:
I think there are some great web 2.0 apps out there that are just begging to be used in the classroom that we cannot get our hands on for safety reasons.
I found this fascinating post on pasta and vinegar via EdTechUK
A butterfly-watching system with WiFi PDAs
Which reminds me of presentation I saw at the EuropeanSchools Project in Finland last year where children used a handheld/moble to send info and pictures back to class. This seems a bit more sophisticated in some ways, the mobile device gets information back for a server.
One of the first thoughs after watching Ewan’s presentation was about commenting, he sugested that folk could organise commenting on each others students/children.
I’ve though about this on and off as I’d like to increase the comments my guys get.
One way would be to get my class to comment on other blogs, but this is a wee bit difficult to organise, we have two network pcs in the class and no lab. With a lab we could have reading and comment sessions omn other blogs, organisation is a bit hard without a bunch of pcs. I’ve also had problems commenting on some blogs we can read at school, but the comment run on site we cannot access through our filters.
I occassionally comment on other primary blogs on a what goes around comes around, sort of way. I started the Primary School Blogs suprglu to try and up my comment rate, but suprglu limits the number of feeds and quite a few primary blogs I’ve found disallow comments.
It might be an idea to start some sort of informal group of teachers who would regularly comment on other class blogs, in an informal but commited sort of way.
I am not sure how many Primary Teachers read this, but if you are up for some sort of Primary Blog Comment Exchange leave a comment here or drop me a mail, there is probably a sensible way to organise this so an idea for that would be appreciated. I’d be happy to host a list of folk / class blogs if that would help.
