Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Learning

Blog nan Gaidheal - How do you use the orange button on blogs and other websites?

Using a tool such as Netvibes or PageFlakes, in the way described in my previous post, you can bring information from websites to one personal homepage. But how to you get that 'feed' from the website to feed your Netvibes or PageFlakes page?

Have a go with the BBC News Site

• Let's navigate through to the BBC Education website. You want to get every new story as it appears on this part of the BBC website, without having to repeatedly visit the BBC.
• On the BBC Education website look for the orange feed button:
  
  
  
  
• Right-click it. Select 'Copy'
• Flick back over to your personal Netvibes or PageFlakes page.
• Click "Add feed"
• Right-click in the white space
• Click paste.
• Click "add to page"

Have a go with a blog

• Repeat the above process, looking for the orange button on blogs such as this one (can you see it in the top-right?) and the Gaelic blogs in this page.

Blog nan Gaidheal - Creating a personal homepage using Netvibes

During the course of the Blogging seminar at Gaelic Masterclass we looked at how teachers could create a personal homepage for themselves or for their classes. We used PageFlakes in the morning and Netvibes in the afternoon - both are much of a muchness, though my heart swayed towards Netvibes at the end of the day. These two free web tools allow you to have the web 'delivered to you', meaning you can set up information to come to your page from sites such as the BBC, from Flickr photo pages (like mine) and from blogs (like the Gaelic ones in the list on this page). It means that you don't have to travel to n different websites - they come to you!

Create a Netvibes page

• Go to netvibes.com
• Click "sign in"
• Click "new user"
• Enter your email address and make up a password. Click Sign Up.

Adding and removing useful/less useful bits to the page
To remove some of the less useful modules:

• Hover your mouse over the title of the module
• Click the little 'x'
• It will disappear

To add new modules:

• Choose your module from the list on the left (Bookmarks, To Do List, Flickr picture box...)
• Click "add to my page"

To add a feed (how do I find feeds?):

• Click "add feed" (top left)
• Paste your feed address into the white space
• Click "Add to my page"

Subscribe to the blog to get some added value

What you see on the blog when you visit is only half the story. Every day I share the best cuttings I find from around the 1500 blogs I graze on, covering not just education but design, digital media, startups, great new tools and examples of some of the theory you hear people bandy on about. You can visit those links any time over on my social bookmarking site, or simply sign up for a free subscription to edu.blogs.com and get it all on tap, every day.

There are some advantages to having my blog content delivered to you, instead of you having to come to my site every day.

• Time-saving - don't waste time coming here when there's no news.
• Extra information - by subscribing you get my daily roundup of bookmarks; what have I been adding to my favourites in the last 24 hours?
• Create your personal archive - like a post and want to keep it? By subscribing you can have a copy of my post on your hard disk in the click of a button.

How do I subscribe?

The easiest way to get every post is to receive a daily email by adding your email address here.

If you want to read several blogs (more than a dozen, perhaps), then invest some time in setting up a feedreader, following these instructions:

1. Copy this link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/edublogs
2. Go to Google Reader (set up a free account if you need to)
3. On the top left of the screen click "Add a subscription"
4. Place the cursor in the white box and paste
5. Click Add feed

It's worth adding your Google Reader page as a browser favourite or bookmark, or even making it your homepage. Every time you visit your Google Reader page you will see the latest posts and bookmarks from me.

Why is RSS not catching on?

RSS seems such a difficult thing for kids to get. They rush home to check through their actual MySpace or Bebo page, they manually check football results and browse YouTube to see if anything's new.

They don't have a feed bring that information to them.

Why?

(If you don't know what it is, check out these RSS guides)

Online Information Conference: Keynote Panel with Scoble et al

  Robert Scoble, 'Naked' 
  Originally uploaded by jdlasica.

I was over the moon and incredibly daunted at the proposition that was made to me a few months ago to take part in the Online Information Conference's keynote panel on the Light Web, alongside Adriana, Matt Locke and Alex Bellinger. I'll be talking about how LT Scotland and East Lothian (temp homepage) are using/trying to use social media to make life more efficient, more connected and break down hierarchies. In education, as we know, breaking down the links between organisation and 'customer' is vital to improving what we can offer.

But I'm even more pleased as punch since finding out that Robert Scoble will be joining us to talk through the same issues. Co-author of Naked Conversations (along with Shel, who visited last month), he will hopefully find the education perspective as interesting as Shel and Rick did (I hope). It's above all the conversations opened up afterwards which are the most interesting part, I'm sure.

Are there any points I should be making? Speak now or forever hold thy sandwich.

Language Shows Hot Links

I've spent the past three days between London, Edinburgh and Stirling at various language shows and conferences, sharing my ideas and examples from around Scotland with those who've not yet discovered some of the social media tools that can bring languages alive. This post will give some of the links mentioned as well as a screencast of a previous conference which covers some of the ground:

• 10 Ways To Stay Connected Without Losing Your Mind from mflePodcasts 21 & 22.
  The original basis for some of the conference notes; talk from May 2006.
• Ideas for setting up blogs in MFL, from the MFLE.
  If you're a teacher in Scotland you could use the MFLE's Typepad subscription to get started (become a member of the MFLE) or pay for your own.
  You might also want to set up a free, simple blog for text and limited photo space on edublogs.org (for teachers) and learnerblogs.org (for students).
  Examples of blogs:
  • Teacher reflection blogs are everywhere - in MFL take a look at Lynne Horn's or Adam Sutcliffe's.
  • Student reflection/formative assessment blogs: Rate My Mates and in English creative writing PinkyParky (flick back to the first month and see the progress gained).
  • Quick teacher publishing of course material and the same done in the primary school.
  • Travelogs, such as those done by Musselburgh Grammar School in 2004, 2005, 2006...
  • Track global audience with a ClustrMap. and see how Marlyn exploited it for Global Citizenship.
• Publish things quickly and easily with a wiki. Try Wikispaces for teachers or PBWiki.
  Examples of wikis:
  • for planning a radio show
  • for banging up stuff for students' homework
  • for telling others about your blog, podcast or wiki
    
    
    
• Get listening to some podcasts by searching for them through iTunes.
• Publishing students' animation and video work at Partners in Excellence.
  You could use GoogleVideo, VeoTag (which allows you to chapter longer videos) or upload video to your Typepad blog.
• Share your photos with a private class group or the world through Flickr or Bubbleshare (which allows voice narratives over pics!).
  Get playing with Flickr:
  • Drag your photos to the map where they were taken by clicking the "Map" tab.
  • Copy this text into the description for each photo:
    <a href="http://www.roblog.com/flickrfly.kml">Fly to this location</a>
(Requires <a href="http://earth.google.com">Google Earth</a>)
  • And now people can "Fly" in Google Earth to where the photo was taken.
• Make a CommunityWalk with your students or see mine for an example in MFL or with video, too.
• See my photos, sign up and become a contact.
• Store your bookmarks online for all to see and share using del.icio.us.
  See what I have bookmarked and explore my categories.
• Get addicted to living in a virtual world with SecondLife.
  Explore and comment on my ideas for using games in MFL in the gaming category of my blog. I'm only learning so would appreciate your views ;-)

Introduction to new technologies for student teachers

The video/audio of the lecture David and I delivered at Jordanhill, the Education Faculty at the Uni of Strathclyde, is up and his post reveals how we managed the feedback of students. It was nice to meet some of the students afterwards and see how different technologies got different people so excited. I can't wait to see what happens with this group as they head into the world of the classroom.

David's got some of the things we used on a special del.icio.us page that the students (and you) can use to see what we were talking about for yourself. I'm going to forward more of the ones we mentioned there over the next few days to populate it a bit better.

Squeezing the blogosphere for the info you want: Technorati

I often come up against the "where do you find the time" argument in relation to my blog reading. Well, Steve Rubel has taken the time to sum up some of the more advanced search ideas to which we then subscibe (so once we've set up a search and taken that 'feed' we never have to go back to the page again - the info flows to us).

I promise you I'll be making up more advice on Technorati because using this tool correctly will make you smarter, quicker and more on the ball than those who don't.

Internet Explorer is going to be pushed into your computer - with RSS, whether you like it or not

RSS will come to all of us tomorrow or within the next month, as Internet Explorer looks set to come with an integrated RSS reader. (OK - it's not that good a reader, but it might be a worthwhile start to this way of working for the masses). This is not just the notification of a 'feed' from a website, in the same way Firefox does at the moment. This is a real, mass market attempt to get the world reading feeds. All this is down to my interpretation of the Internet Explorer 7 notes, but I think I've interpreted things correctly.

The biggest problem people have had with blogs, for example, is that most of the ones they find have been the result of a Google search, the perusal of some lonely heart type daily journal and the out and out refusnick attitude that blogs are useless. At least having an integrated reader to the world's most popular browser might make them start believing this really can be mainstream.

Is anyone picking up on the kind of conversations Ewan has had today? ;-)

Full post feeds on edu.blogs.com

After over a year of providing only partial feeds of edu.blogs.com for those who subscribe through Bloglines or GoogleReader, I've decided to release that content and give it all, full and unadulterated, streaming into your RSS reader. I'm interested to see how it affects readership in the long term and how it affects the number reading my feed. Let me know if this is something which makes reading the blog easier for you and please don't forget to come back now and then to the page itself to remind yourself of what I look like ;-)