Summercore Journal

It has been a very long day.  After my last post I did do a little exploring and added some bookmarks to my delicious account.  It was a little confusing at first, but now I have several and I even made one larger category called a bundle that keeps bookmarks sorted under a heading.  I can see this can be useful.

We had a final session in the classroom to go over the answers for questions 11-33 of the quiz.  Tomorrow we are supposed to make a Wiki about the 33 questions.  A wiki is like a blog but more collaborative.  Typically a blog has one owner who posts and others make comments.  In a Wiki everyone can post and edit the posted information.  I wonder if a Wiki or a blog might be a good thing for everyone to keep track of what’s happening in the Nursery studio?  We could post pictures and text, the children could even help once we get started.  Classroom teachers could respond and/or edit what’s posted and have up to date information on the children’s experiences.

I have just read the assignment for tonight, Chapter 14-Blogs, Wikis and RSS.  This helped me think a little more about format for the studio project.  If we did a wiki, children could also work with their classroom teachers to add information, comments and pictures of related work they are doing in their rooms, and that would be good.  I will have to find out if there is any policy at HM related to using these.  The chapter explained the process of setting up a blog very clearly and was good review of what we did today.  I think I noticed a few little differences.  For instance, it give two ways to post on the blog, either to go to edublogs.org and log in or to use the Meta section of the blog.  It doesn’t mention that the meta section has to be added as a widget.  Also, it give two choices when setting up a blog, “student” or “teacher”. It doesn’t mention that there is also an “other” category.  I wonder what the differences are between the categories?

The section on RSS feeds was interesting.  RSS allows an individual to subscribe (for free) to a number of blogs or other feeds and have all of them appear in one place, by way of an “aggregator”.  This can be done using a number of sites such as google reader or bloglines.  It sounds like it could really save time if you normally visit a number of blogs or other sites frequently, especially since it shows new postings and saves you going to the sites if there is nothing new.  Since I haven’t done much with blogs or other sites that have RSS feeds I’m not sure how much I would use this right now, but maybe it will come in handy.

Maybe tomorrow I will jazz up this page with some pictures and links and stuff!

We started with introductions and a session related to basic terms, mostly of storage capacities. Did you know that 1 byte is actually 8 bits, and 1 kilobyte is roughly equal to one page of double spaced text, while a gigabyte is about the size of the library of congress? I will have to practice all this information because there is a 33 question quiz to take. If you get 100 you win $33!

This posting should actually be called “the first day” because it’s now after lunch and I’m only starting to work on my blog! It took some time this morning to get the blog going…the computers were running very slowly and when I finally got registered with edublog.com the email that was supposed to give me my password never came. It turned out our ever-vigilant HM spam filter was blocking it! I got around this by using my gmail account to set up the blog.

After our lunch break we had a session about web pages that are really cool. I’m about to go do a little exploring…I have just set up an account at delicious.com that will allow me to store my bookmark files where they are always accessible and can’t get lost.