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Jess has captured the essence of the question “why blog?” with an exceptional amount of eloquence an insight.

Why would I wan’t to publish my personal life on the Internet so that just anyone could read them? It’s a privacy issue for me.

However, I believe that a blog created for the purposes of academic learning and reflection is effective, interesting and perhaps not so revealing of my personal life The ability to disseminate not just information or knowledge but also thoughts, debates and commentaries on them excites me. I can see a world of possibility for interaction and growth between individual learners.

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Blogging includes, but is not the sum of the reflections on one’s experiences or learning. Blogging is an instrument of communication, growth and learning. Even reading a social blog, you learn about the blogger’s experiences, reflecting on your learning and growing as a result. The act of reading the blog in the first place is an act of communication, furthered when you post your findings to your blog for others to read.

We in the EdTech space struggle everyday with getting teachers, parents, and administration to understand why technologies such as blogging are useful and beneficial not only in the classroom but beyond. Next time you get into this discussion, send them a link to Jess’s blog. Jess gets it.

I’m taking a stab at embedding a SlideShare presentation into this so I might as well make it worthwhile. This presentation is about some ideas for using Google Docs in the classroom.

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I’m a rabid fan of Google Reader and when I found this tip on using a public folder from Google Reader to create the blogroll for your web site, well I have to say I was a happy man. If you want to see it in action you can check mine out here.

Blogroll Powered by Google Reader
Bloglines has a feature that lets you automatically create a blogroll from the feeds you’ve subscribed to. This way, you don’t have to maintain your blogroll because it’s permanently in sync with your subscriptions. “On many blogs, there are lists of links to other blogs. These lists are called blogrolls. You can incorporate your Bloglines subscriptions into your blog, as a blogroll, by including a small piece of HTML that loads a script from Bloglines.”

Now here’s a good, practical example of putting a technology such as Google Docs to use in the classroom.

Techforlearning » 2007 » June
High School students learning to write resumes can easily be successful when using Google Docs and Microsoft Office Templates. After seeing one resume model and discussing formatting students can use Google Docs to brainstorm the sections of their resume.

Last year we began with a complete redesign of the school web site, moving from your typical Dreamweaver “oh isn’t it cute and pretty” design to a content management system with more spit and polish. We’re running Joomla (I’ll explain the decision process on that in another post) and began with a basic site template and porting the content from the existing sites to the new one.

I need to clarify something. Up until last year for several years the school had two web sites, one for marketing the school and one for general parent-oriented information. The creation of the two sites was in direct support of a capital fund raising campaign and had been carried along after the campaign ended.

In observing the traffic on both web sites for some time (using Google Analytics, one of my favorite tools for this) I found that we were receiving a lot of crossover traffic. People were visiting the marketing site looking for daily school info and vice versa. It was at this point I decided it was necessary to merge the two sites back together. What needed to happen was:

• A sample of the new site needed to be built
• Example content moved
• Processes for updating that content needed to be outlined (this proved to be the most involved part)
• Review and approval of the new approach and site by the Administration and the EdTech Group. (I’ll explain what the EdTech Group is another time)

Constructing the new example site and loading it with content was easy enough due to the hosting company we use for our web presence. Bluehost has provided us with good service and offers an easy installation tool to bring new sites online rapidly.

Next…detailing the build.

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