Yesterday, was the first day of classes at the University of Regina, although my first day of teaching is today. This semester, I am teaching two sections of ECMP 355 (under a CC license) which will be held face-to-face this time around. ECMP 355 is an introductory course to using technology in the K-12 classroom. It’s a very popular class here, although, still not a mandatory requirement in our program.
Like the last few years, I will continue to use blogging for the duration of the course, although the emphasis is increasing. I’m looking forward to using James Farmer’s Edublogs.org system this year. In past semesters, I’ve had students use Blogger usually, unless they had access to their own server and a bit more-than-usual technical ability. My issue with Blogger has always been the environment … it’s hard enough to convince teachers/schools to use blogging without having to use the Blogspot environment which is full of innappropriate content. Having a WordPress-based hosting service like Edublogs is a real a treat, and will be invaluable to my students. Kudos to James.
I’m also experimenting with podcasting this semester. I’ve put together the first ECMP 355 podcast on the ECMP Blog. I’m interested to see how students react to the idea of podcasts in a course such as this, or in their own future teaching.
There’s lots to do, and I’m excited, as always, to start with a new group of preservice teachers this semester. I’ll keep you all posted.
I was hoping to use this as well but am running into a bit of an issue regarding posting with the visual editor. Unless I’m missing something, which is always a strong possibility, I cannot add proper html tags such as links. If I hand code it seems to work but I’m not about to get into this with beginning teachers. If you wouldn’t mind investigating and seeing if you have the same issue, I’d appreciate it. I emailed James about it and he seemed to recognize the problem but wasn’t sure he would be able to fix it right away.
I’m hoping it’s something very simple I’ve overlooked.
Pffft, Alec you slacker. We started nearly 10 days earlier ;)
Thanks for the great site in EduBlogs. Used it to set up my classroom blog which I introduced tonight at Meet the Teacher night. Seemed like the parents were quite interested in this with another way of being able to see what their children are up to.
It seems like the principal and other teachers are also really interested in blogging and what it could bring to the school and education.
I’d like to be notified if you begin to use podcasts.
Michael Bell