My Technology Addictions

Five Weeks of Fun

I haven’t written a post for nearly 2 months but have been spending nearly ever day of the past 2 months on my laptop, I have been teaching and developing software. This is a short rundown of my experience with a group of great teenagers that I introduced to the web one day a week over a five week period.
In the last term of school I have had a group of 14, 15 year olds for one day a week over 5 weeks showing them all the wonders of the web. They were a great group of kids from 3 different high schools, they created blogs, added to a class wiki, created iGoogle pages and lastly created podcasts.

I was surprised how little of these technologies they knew or had even heard about. I think the more we use these things like blogs, wiki’s flickr, twitter and facebook ourselves we assume that others, especially the teenagers also know about them. They had a great knowledge of what games they can play online, chat programs and some knew about MySpace and most had an email account and all knew about YouTube, but that was about it. They did not know what Blogs, wiki’s or podcasts were.
The challenge with this group was how to show them how to use these technologies, keep it interesting, relevant and get through the work in the small amount of time we had. They had set tasks to complete each week and this was all detailed for them on a class wiki that I set up, this also contains links to their blogs, del.icio.us accounts and podcasts.

When it came to creating podcasts I had visions of copyright issues spinning around in my head and eventually I thought of using Nursery Rhymes. I decided that the easiest way to get them to create their podcasts was to give them a list of Nursery Rhymes. These are the steps that they followed:

They each picked one Nursery Rhyme and then created a PowerPoint presentation of the Nursery Rhyme.

A new slide was used for each line of the Nursery Rhyme and they had to add appropriate images.

The slides from the Presentation were saved as images, a handy feature of PowerPoint.

Then using Windows Movie Maker they imported the slides, recorded the Rhyme and added transitions and effects.

Once this stage was completed they saved the Movie file.

Then using SUPER © they converted it to a mp4 format.

I created a podomatic site for the class, they uploaded their podcasts and now they can been seen by all.

Most of them created 2 podcasts and really enjoyed it, although some of the recordings don’t sound “too enthusiastic“, as the first thing they said when recording their voices was ” I don’t sound like that!”.

All in all it was a great exercise, exhausting but enjoyable. My adventure into the world of web 2 and more my inspiration and knowledge comes from my friend Sue who introduced and taught me how to use them. She is a wealth of knowledge and shares it with all, thanks Sue

Running really late now!

One thing is for sure I will not be getting all the tasks done by the end of August. I will still keep plugging away at the tasks that are relevant to my blog but have really got behind mainly due to work and coming down with the flu.

Back on board now and back into it so away we go. Looking at the list of tasks for Days 15 to 22 seems kind of ironic that they have titles like Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky , Create a Heatmap, Run a StumbleUpon Campaign, and last but not least Create a Sneeze Page and Propel Readers Deep Within Your Blog. Here I am feeling about 90% after a bout of the flu and all the tasks seems to point to stumbling around making things sticky and spreading germs.

Not really but I thought it was funny to have that collection of tasks all together. The Heatmap task would be cool to try but not an option with edublogs. So can’t do that one. StumbleUpon I have a plugin for Firefox for StumbleUpon but don’t intend to run a StumbleUpon Campaign in relation to my blog. That wasn’t too hard two down six to go.

Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky and Create a Sneeze Page and Propel Readers Deep Within Your Blog will both have to be works in progress I think. I want to find a theme for my Sneeze page and need to investigate which post as popular. I could even add another page and have a changing list of popular posts there, what do you think?

Respond to Comments on Your Blog I have been doing this with almost all the comments that have been added to my blog - (maybe a little behind over past week) especially since starting the 31 Day Challenge. I have found that it has created a continuing conversation with the comments rather than static comments. It makes the reader feel more “real” to me and I have found that most commenter’s are then coming back to read and comment again. Its always a thrill when a comment is added, the fact that someone has taken the time to visit and then leave a comment is really appreciated. Thanks to you all .

Catch New Readers Up on the Basics of your Blog I added a new page What is that? a while ago that hopefully will help new visitors to the blog and visitors who are new to the blog concept. I also changed some of the terms used on the side links after Day 2 task of Run a First Time Reader Audit. I found that just because I knew what a Blogroll was this did not mean that one of my readers did.

This then leads into the next task to Run a Reader Survey. I am going to take the simple option here and not so much as run a survey but ask for feedback or comments. I have changed the theme and layout of the blog since starting the 31 Days to a Better Blog Chocolate Challenge and have added pages to help visitors. I have tried to name links with out using “geek speak” . I have added information to my A little about me page, and removed many of the links “widgets” from the blog. So my survey question is do you find it easy to move around the current design of the blog. Is it easy to read and leave comments? Please leave comments to answer these questions then I will have completed another task.

Last one for today Make a Reader Famous I would like to make all littlest readers famous and encourage everyone to go and visit their blogs. So Minilegends you are my readers that I wish to make famous. the Minilegends are a class of year 3 - 8 and 9 year olds from Glenelg School in South Australia who have a class blog as well as individual blogs.

So that’s a load of tasks done but not necessarily finished and all out of order. I hope to go and visit all the members of the Chocolate Challenge blogs and leave a comment over the next few days and see how they have all gone with the tasks. We have all struggled to keep on top of the 31 tasks but have learnt so much about the who why and how we blog, it has been an exhausting but very rewarding exercise that has also created a new online community of friends. And its not finished yet…..

More information about our Chocolate Challenge

Go and visit the Chocolate Challenge members:

Cammy Bean Tim Davies Eklavya

Kate Foy Sue Hickton Christine Martell

Michelle Martin Alex Miller Kate Quinn

Sue Waters Laura Whitehead

The Famous MiniLegends

  Timely warning for students

Today my students received a timely warning on personal security on the internet. In class we have created Gmail accounts then gone onto create iGoogle personalised home pages. They have created del.icio.us accounts and signatures for the Gmail email accounts. One task required them to email all of their class mates and their lecturer (me) and send a link to their del.icio.us accounts. This was as way of all students getting each others contacts and del.icio.us links.

As always in these sort of classes I go over security, guarding your personal information on the internet, logging in and our procedures and student code of conduct and internet usage policies that they have all signed and agreed to at the beginning of term.

On Thursday several students and myself received an email full of swearing and sounding very upset at the rest of the students in the class from one of the other students. I spoke to this student to ask if they were having trouble with the other class mates? No and the student when shown the email knew nothing about it. On further investigation we found the student was not at TAFE on Thursday and when going through the history on the PC where the email originated we found that the browser automatically signed into his Gmail account. Now after this episode all the students in the class Sign in and Sign out of their Google accounts. Just because a browser is closed and internet connection is also closed does not mean your account is also closed especially if you have selected to ”Remember me on this computer” then someone else can come along and log into your accounts. Beware.

 Sign in & ALWAYS  Sign out

Running out of Time - 1 weeks tasks - Done

Unexpected work commitments has propelled my into a state of feeling like I am chasing my tail and defiantly running out of time to get my blog tasks completed.

A run down of the tasks for days 8 - 14 include a few things that I have already done.

Day 8 - Comment on a Blog You’ve Never Commented On Before just being part of this challenge has seen me visit lots of different blogs and leave comments. - Done
Day 9 - Run an Advertising Audit On Your Blog Not relevant to this blog - Done

Day 10 - Declutter Your Sidebar As I have worked through the different tasks in this challenge I have been constantly changing the look and functionality of my blog. I made a lot of changes after the First Time Reader Audit and have removed several widgets from my sidebar since then. I like the clean lines of this template, what do you think? should I add more sidebar functions? - Done and continuing.

Day 11 - Dig into Your Blog’s Statistics This has been a fun thing to look at - my statistics. If it wasn’t for you coming to read my blog there wouldn’t be any statistics to look at. As the saying goes a picture paints a thousand words. Unlike Sue I added Google Analytics a few weeks ago and use this along with Sitemeter and Statcounter. They all seem to give a different view of visits and when I get more time will probably cut these down to just two. AS you can see from the image of my stats below, from being involved in the 31 Days to a better blog project I have gone from 0, 1 visits a day to a whopping 95 visits and 200+ page views. This was very exciting, especially with a blog that has only been going for 5 months. So thanks for visiting - Done

Day 12 - Introduce Yourself to another Blogger Over the past 12 days I have introduced myself to many other blogger’s. Both through people involved in the 31 day challenge and also twitter and my del.icio.us links. - Done

Day 13 - Search for an Affiliate Program that Fits Your Blog - Doesn’t fit with my blog type - Done

Day 14 - Analyze Your Blog’s Competition - I looked at this task as a way of finding other blogs that cover a similar field to me. This is an on going process and one of my biggest “Competitors” would have to be Sue - friendly competitors. The wealth of information on Sue’s blog is testament to her dedication in seeking information and passing it onto others. I like using Digg Google Blog Search but most of the time I wander from one article to another on different blogs. I would be interested to hear how you find articles and blog that you are interested in? - Done

Even though some of these task are not relevant to the way that I am using my blog I have added them to this article and provided a link to Darren’s original post in the hope that it may help some visitors and you never know maybe one day I will need this information also.

miniLegends Join the challenge

Today we welcome the newest members to the 31Days to a Better Blog Chocolate Challenge. I met Al Upton through Sue on twitter and we have been trying to encourage him to join the challenge and last night he and his class the miniLegends did. The miniLegends are Year 3 students - 9 year olds from South Australia. It is the first class to join the challenge and Al did note on the blog that chocolate was definitely a motivation. I wish them good luck and hope they have as much fun as I am. We hade better watch out for this lot they have 30+ years start on us. Wow that sounds a lot doesn’t it!!

I have visited their blog and already learnt something that I didn’t know before. I read the post about googlepages and went and investigated. What a fabulous service free web pages that allow you to upload 100mb!!!  You need a Google account and then it is simply a matter of going to Google Page Creator and it took me about five minutes to create a simple page. This would be great for on the fly work, notes for students or even meeting minutes. I think I could even use it as a message board for my kids if I needed. A Great simple tool with 100’s of uses I am sure. I would love to here if you are using it.