Moblogging from Montpellier

This week two colleagues are accompanying a trip to Montpellier with 14 Year 10 girls. We set up a live blog at http://www.montpellierlive08.blogspot.com/ to record their progress and so far things are going really well. They have blogged a number of photos and have made their first gabcast recording - a clip in French about how they are settling in. The most exciting part is watching the site meter and seeing parents and friends repeatedly log in to check for news. Given that Woldingham girls come from far and wide our blog community is already global, with visits from Thailand, the USA, France, Belgium and of course the UK. Have a look this week and maybe post them a comment!

Revision wikis

I've only recently started getting interested in wikis, and thinking about how they can be used in schools, compared to the potential of using a blog. A podcast by Joe Dale recently alerted me to work being done by a previous Head of Department of mine, Peter Morris, at Gordano School near Bristol. Now I know this isn't a good time to be flagging up revision sites (we have a stream of Year 11s handing in their textbooks today now it's all over) but Gordano's German and French revision sites are interesting ones to have as links on your blogs or intranet pages. I've started a wiki link roll, so please let me know if you are aware of any others for the list.

A blog is born

Blogs really are incredibly flexible things, and I was interested to hear from Jeff Chadd today of Barrow Sixth Form College, who attended my course on Monday. His college use Moodle and he was keen to think through where VLEs and blogs overlapped and to what extent blogging would be relevant to his situation. After four hours plus of hands-on Jeff has come up with a great looking blog to host a variety of multi-media resources that might not be so easily hosted in Moodle. I look forward to seeing how it develops!

Hi

Had a great time working with five teachers in Leeds today during a course on blogging and social learning networks. In all 10 new blogs in edublogs and blogger saw the light of day and we enjoyed creating voki characters, embedding video and games and exploring widgets. It was a nice surprise when we noticed Joe Dale had referred to the presentation we were following through the day in his post. For anyone beginning blogging, just a reminder - you can search this site for "blog club" entries to get instructions on the basics of blogging, from setting up to writing posts and pages and installing a couple of widgets. Don't forget there are great help videos in edublogs and plenty of tips and guidance in the dashboard area of blogger. Happy blogging...we certainly were today!

Tasks for blog club

On your marks! - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: On your marks!

Quick start guides

For a reminder for blog-clubbers I've uploaded two basic guides to using blogger and edublogs to the scribd website. Remember you can then embed documents from scribd into your blog, but I'm just inserting the links here to save space.

blogger basics:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3257831/Quick-start-guide-to-blogger

edublogs basics:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3257990/EDUBLOGS-QUICK-START-GUIDE

Introduction to Social Networking Sites