Article posted April 4, 2010 at 02:05 PM GMT-5 •
comment (18) • Reads 85246
Greetings, and I hope that you are having a wonderful Sunday holiday. I've been working on Class Blogmeister, the comments features to be specific. That part of CB has been tweeked so much that
the code was coming too look like the spider's web of an intoxicate arachnid. So I completely rewrote all of that code and it seems to be working fine. There were actually a number of different programs that handled comments, depending on the type of comment and the security settings of the teacher. Now it's all in one program.
Also, I took the opportunity to change the way that comments are made secure by the teacher. Rather than choose one setting from a list of three options, you can now choose to switch on or off for different settings. They are:
Teacher Approval Required
Class Password Required
Must be a Class Blogmeister member
Must be a Class Blogmeister member and a member of the class
The second two are brand new. With the 3rd feature switched on, people need to be logged into CB in order to post a comment. That way the commenters ID number is associated with the comment. If the 4th feature is switched on, then the commenter must either be assigned to the blogger's class or the teacher of that class. This should help out a lot...
Article posted April 4, 2010 at 02:05 PM GMT-5 •
comment (18) • Reads 85246
Article posted October 24, 2009 at 08:58 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 22212
Folks have been having some problems with getting Blabberize embed to work in Class Blogmeister. I found the problem and it was, as is often the case, a pesky apostrophe.
There is a script in CB that takes all web URLs and converts them into hyperlinks. This forces some code around the URLs that causes the links. Now sometimes, URLs are included in embeds, so I had to write in some exceptions -- "make hyperlink unless.." and I'd taken care of most of them, except where the hyperlink is surrounded by apostrophes.
Sooo, I added that exception in, and it seems to be working fine, as you can see to the right.
Article posted October 24, 2009 at 08:58 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 22212
Article posted September 17, 2009 at 07:50 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 12453
It's one of those ideas that has occurred to me during those moments when a perfect example presents itself, but then loses itself in the stack of other ideas of similar birth and death. But here, at the beginning of the school year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), it seems like a good time to suggest Blog Worthy Topics. I'm thinking specifically of learner blogs, classrooms where both teacher-learner and student-learner are blogging, and sometimes looking for topics for writing, sharing, and engaging about.
So I want to suggest a Twitter hash tag, #bwtopic. I just did a search of bwtopic in Twitter and it appears to be a unique string.. So, as you encounter a newspaper or magazine article, blog post, speech, YouTube or TED video, or whatever, that seems like an appetizing topic for learners to explore and build on, then Tweet it with the hash tag #bwtopic.
We can follow the suggestions via RSS. Here is the feed (Atom) for a Twitter search for #bwtopic.
Article posted June 2, 2009 at 09:14 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 18442
A request came through the mailing list about the fact that the only opens for listing bloggings in CB were 5 blogs, 10, 20, or all. All could be a lot of blog entries for some of you.
I've tried to remedy this by making CB more consistent with the way that other blogging engines work, with a listing of ten entries and the ability to list the previous ten or the next ten. That seemed to work, except that some folks may want to list all. So a added to that bottom navigation menu the ability to show all blog, or to show only the titles of all blogs. If I understand the concerns, this should make everyone happy. Famous last words.
I've also dressed up the meta data line (information about the entry) and added added an additional one just beneath the entry title. So you can see the entry date immediately now, rather than having to scroll to the bottom of the entry.
I hope that this is helpful!
Article posted June 2, 2009 at 09:14 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 18442
Article posted June 1, 2008 at 11:31 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 72920
You're going to love this -- and if you live north of the equator, your going to hate me for waiting until now. Thanks to some urging from my Catalan friend, Dolors Permanyer, I've done a little research and I found an open source code script that will help us use a more graphical user interface in your blog writing. Another term for it is WYSIWYG -- or What You See Is What You Get. This means that you'll have an option of getting a more word processor way of writing blog entries using Class Blogmeister. See here:
And here's how it works. The next time you go to write or edit a blog article, you will see, just above where you normally set the text size, the following text:
[Text] / Graphical (wysiwyg)
Notice brackets around "Text." This means that you are currently in text mode. If you click "Graphical," the page will reload into the graphical mode, with the brackets appearing around that word.
If you run into problems, then just switch back to the text mode, and I'll fix the problem when I get back from North Dakota.
I've hesitated doing this, because making this much use of Java (and probably some Ajax) runs into browser compatibility issues. I'm hoping things have gotten to the point where this is not so much of a problem.
Good luck to you all!
Article posted June 1, 2008 at 11:31 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 72920
Article posted February 23, 2008 at 09:16 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 10666
This is certainly one of the more interesting things to happen through this blog. Yesterday, Barcelona educator and Class Blogmesiter user, Dolors Permanyer, and I realized that we met over 10 years ago at a conference in Callus, Spain. I was presenting at the conference about ThinkQuest and she was a local attendee. When I learned that she was an English teacher, I asked her and she agreed to translate my talk into Catalan. Here are some pictures that I captured with a cheap camera and later digitized.
Me talking in Near English By the way, it looks like we're using one of those old LCD panels that you placed on an overhead projector to project computer display. Remember those days?
Article posted February 23, 2008 at 09:16 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 10666
Article posted December 28, 2007 at 08:23 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 5078
I've been taking some days off from writing -- and giving my Starbucks card a rest. During the intermittent moments between family and relaxing, I've been tinkering around with Class Blogmeister code, adding a few new features.
First of all, as you have noticed the new front page, you may also notice a new item in the main menu, Statistics. I'm kinda proud of this, partly because it utilizes a nifty little Google tool that generates dynamic graphics based on your data. Here you can get basic stats (current number of bloggers, total blog posts to date, blogs posted in the last hour, last 24 hours, and last week). You can also get a more detailed listing (and graph) of blogs posted by the week and by the hour. I've also re-added a cloud feature that will post the most used words in the last 100 teacher blogs and the last 100 student blogs.
Finally, this morning, I added a feature that has been requested by a number of teacher bloggers. As some of you have numerous classes with lots of students, requiring lots of scrolling, I've set the classes to be collapsed. So you simply click the class you want to see students for, and it expands out. You computer will remember that class for a period of time, keeping it expanded out as you return to your teacher page.
Please let me know if this causes any problems.
Happy New Year!
Article posted December 28, 2007 at 08:23 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 5078
Article posted December 16, 2007 at 09:38 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 5463
I've taken my last trip for the year and commenced on another major writing project -- thanks in no small part to your contributions to my Starbucks card.
I've taken a few breaks, though, here and there, to write a little code. It relaxes me. The result is a new front page for Class Blogmeister. I hope that it is a little more cheery.
Happy holidays to you all.
-- dave --
Article posted December 16, 2007 at 09:38 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 5463
Article posted December 11, 2007 at 12:54 PM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 5188
I'll be delivering an ISTE Webinar later this afternoon, and it occured to me last night that I might try to suggest some instructional uses of blogs aligned with the new ISTE NETS Refresh. I'm including them here as a reference for the Webinar participants and for you.
Creativity & Innovation
Assignment:
In the coming weeks, major news outlets will start talking about the leading events of 2007 and the most influencial (or best dressed) people, i.e. Time's "'Man' of the Year." Few of your students will remember when these same agencies were talking about the events and people of the century and even of the millennium.
As a creative blogging assignment, we might ask students to look through the lists of the people and events of the year and of the century (People of the Year & Man of the Century) and then speculate on an achievement that might define the 21st century, describe it, and describe a ficticious person who is most responsible for the achievement.
After the original blog posts have been made, then classmates and others could comment on the articles, describing how the achievement of the century might impact on them.
Communication & Collaboration
Assignment:
As you are studying a part of the world in Social Studies class, ask students to write blog entries about what they are learning and also their reflections about the places and people they are learning about.
Connect with another class in that part of the world (Use ePals' Class Finder), and arrange for students in that class to read your students' blogs and then comment on them with clarifications.
Research & Information Fluency
Assignment:
As students are engaged in a major research assignment, as them to journal daily about their experience, listing what information they have found, how they found it, and how they evaluated the information to assure its appropriateness to the assignment.
Read and comment on the blog entries, giving support, tips, corrections, and other aide.
After reading a story, novel, or play, ask students to pretend to be one of the characters, and describe one sentence that might have been spoken to another character and at what time, that might have overcome the roadblocks of the problem more quickly and with less cost.
Ask classmates to read the blog entries and comment what the second character would logically have said in return.
Digital Citizenship
Assignment:
Through class discussions, establish a bloggers code of digital citizenship and then ask students to select one of the elements of the code and write a blog entry about why it is important, describing the harm that ignoring it can harm, and strategies for making it a practice of habit.
Have classmates read and comment on, expressing support and making recommendations about strategies.
Technology Operation & Concepts
Assignment:
Ask students to learn about a new web tool and prepare to demonstrate it to the class. Ask them to journal, in their blog, their process for learning the tool, how the went about finding the answers to questions about operation or reasoning their ways into the solutions.
Then ask classmates to read the blog entries and comment, identifying the skills that seemed to be the most useful to the blogger.
There is obviously a lot of overlap, as many of these blogging activities address a number of the ISTE standards. Bottome line is that blogging is about communication, conversation, language, sharing, and building.
Article posted December 11, 2007 at 12:54 PM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 5188
Article posted May 29, 2007 at 01:00 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 4718
Several days ago I installed an open source survey program on my web server, and fairly hastily set up a seven question poll for teacher-users of Class Blogmeister. Over the next week or so I got more than 50 participants and I am reporting the results here.
It is important to note that this was not a scientific study, and I am making no attentions to calculate any statistical likelihood of its ability to predict any larger trends or behaviors. I am just describing how 50+ teachers answer these questions.
The data was desegregated by grade level, but there were so few respondents of K-2 and 9-12 classes, that I combined them to report on grades K-5 educators and grades 6-12.
Here I am only looking for vague impresses about student motivation when they are blogging. The question could probably have been much better worded.
It's worth noting that the two groups are pretty closely tied together, possibly indicating how poor the wording of the question was.
These next questions are better, since I ask whether the teacher has actually seen evidence that students are learning better. Most often, today, we actually want to see that evidence in test scores. But I want to trust teachers to say, yes, I believe that my students are learning better, and I've seen things that make me believe that.
Again, the differences between the elementary and secondary respondents is not great. However, it is interesting to see that educators of younger children more often indicated that the Strongly Agreed with the statement.
This question also seeks to determine if blogging is motivating to students writing, especially if they are writing within the context of some academic subject. What would be even more interesting might be to find out, if it is more motivating, what qualities of blogging make students/people want to do it.
Again, indications from the 50 respondents is that blogging is motivating, perhaps more so for elementary than secondary, but not significantly so, considering the small sampling.
Now we're getting to the crux of the situation. Do students become better writers when they blog. I believe that I have. But do teachers believe that their students have -- at least these 50 teachers.
Here the trend reverses, as secondary teachers are more likely to see evidence of writing improvement in their blogging students than elementary teachers. There are certainly lots of possible reasons that have more to do with who responded to this poll than the writing experiences of blogging students.
Most directly, blogging is about literacy, writing and reading and writing. However, how much of what I'm coming to call learning literacy is going on. Are students actually learning what they write about better, than when they are simply being taught it.
I suspect that there is little to be gained here except that teachers believe that their students are learning when they blog.
This is one of the questions I was most interested in learning about. Who benefits the most from blogging in the classrooms. Once again, the sampling is too small and the conditions to chaotic to draw any real conclusions, but the secondary teachers who responded to this survey felt more strongly that lower achieving students gained more from blogging than did the average and above average performing students -- this more so than elementary teachers.
Finally, a fairly broad question that might be carried much more deeply in some future survey. Teachers seemed to all agree that there were side affect outcomes to classroom blogging, influences not directly attributed to the blogging experience.
Article posted May 29, 2007 at 01:00 AM GMT-5 •
comment • Reads 4718
It's one of those ideas that has occurred to me during those moments when a perfect example presents itself, but then loses itself in the stack of other ideas of similar birth and death. But here, at the beginning of the school year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), it seems like a good time to suggest Blog Worthy Topics. I'm thinking specifically of learner blogs, classrooms where both teacher-learner and student-learner are blogging, and sometimes looking for topics for writing, sharing, and engaging about.
This is certainly one of the more interesting things to happen through this blog. Yesterday, Barcelona educator and Class Blogmesiter user, Dolors Permanyer, and I realized that we met over 10 years ago at a conference in Callus, Spain. I was presenting at the conference about ThinkQuest and she was a local attendee. When I learned that she was an English teacher, I asked her and she agreed to translate my talk into Catalan. Here are some pictures that I captured with a cheap camera and later digitized. 
Me talking in Near English By the way, it looks like we're using one of those old LCD panels that you placed on an overhead projector to project computer display. Remember those days?
First of all, as you have noticed the new front page, you may also notice a new item in the main menu, Statistics. I'm kinda proud of this, partly because it utilizes a nifty little Google tool that generates dynamic graphics based on your data. Here you can get basic stats (current number of bloggers, total blog posts to date, blogs posted in the last hour, last 24 hours, and last week). You can also get a more detailed listing (and graph) of blogs posted by the week and by the hour. I've also re-added a cloud feature that will post the most used words in the last 100 teacher blogs and the last 100 student blogs.
I've taken my last trip for the year and commenced on another major writing project -- thanks in no small part to your contributions to my Starbucks card.
