Blog Posts We Learned From

About a Teacher
Greta Sandler is the author of this blog where she talks about creating safe learning environments and shares her thoughts as a teacher.

Mr. McClung's Reflections
Mr. McClung shares his thoughts on his first year of teaching in his blog post "What I've Learned this Year".

Morgan Bayda
Morgan Bayda is a student teacher in Saskatchewan who watched Dan Brown's video, "An Open Letter to Educators". In this video, Dan says that "my schooling was getting in the way of my education". Morgan shares her thoughts on this video and how it is somewhat personally relevant to her.

Tech Literate Teacher
Our Teacher never sleeps! He is the author of several different, very useful blogs on different topics related to technology and education. The link above will take you to his blog on, well, a few different things but they are all quite relevant to our mission as educators to reach our students on levels they are familiar with in order to revive the institution of education! Or something like that.

Jamie Lynn Miller's Blog
Jamie Lynn Miller is a lab associate for Dr. Strange's class. I really liked her posts on Shelfari, Alt= and Title= tags, wordles, and PLN. Her post, "Why is it important for students to post their work to blogs" is very relevant to our idea for creating this blog. If you are not entirely convinced, maybe you should read this post. She also has some helpful videos!

Pt. England School Blogs
We were assigned to comment this semester on various classroom's blogs from this school in Auckland, New Zealand! It is an impressive school to say the least. These kids are learning so much through technology and blogging.

How to: Enhance your blog

How to: Enhance your blog
To start off with, it is first important to set up your blog the way you want it before you begin posting.  It sometimes causes confusion to go back and add add-ons.We want to show you how to enhance your blog! It is important in blogging that you feel confident about the blog that you are making available for others to comment on.
Here are some simple things that I found to be somewhat simple but exciting to see on my blog!
Widgets:



Grooveshark widget:
Carly has the Grooveshark widget on her page because she likes to share her music. It was actually easy to install! *Instructions*
First you will need to sign up for Grooveshark. Then you can create your playlist. There will be an option that says "Share playlist"; choose the "widget" option. It will let you customize the


colors of your player and the songs you want it to play. Once you have copied the html code to embed, go to the "design" tab on your Blogger dashboard. Find "Add a gadget" then go to the option that's "HTML/Java Script. Paste the copied embed code in the content box and save and you are ready to go!!





Wibiya toolbar:
Stumble Upon, is so easy to get addicted to! One of the blogs it "stumbled" lately used this feature. I thought it was very cool because it's not just for you, it's convenient for the people viewing your blog. If you post a lot on your blog because you have a lot to say, and someone happened to feel chaotic, they could

join you in live chat to ask any questions they had directly. Say, if you were a teacher, a parent, member of administration, or student could ask you anything they need to momentarily. Also, you can translate the post if you need to, view recent posts, share on twitter, like on facebook, watch their YouTube Videos, and also view their latest twitter updates. This is useful, but especially for a teacher. Being reachable and available at the time that questions arise for help when it is actually needed is vital. 
Go to www.wibiya.com to get and customize your own for free! You can customize what websites or features you would like to use. If you need any help, you know how and where to reach us!

Shelfari:
Teachers, would you like to add a virtual bookshelf to the margin of your page to let your students and parents know about and keep up with the readings for your class? It's so easy and it looks really cute. It first came up when we were introduced to Mrs. Kathleen Cassidy's blog. This would also be helpful on a student blog because they could embed it on their blog and not have to keep referring to their teacher's blog.

If you would like to preview a shelfari add-on before creating one, you can view Carly's that she created out of sheer nerd-dom. (*Disclaimer:This is the actually webpage for the shelfari, the widget looks much different and should only take up part of the marginal space of your blog page.

http://www.shelfari.com/o1515079450/shelf

Welcome to Our Blog!

We are Kristen Whitehurst, Chelsea Krail, and Carly Pugh, students of Dr. Strange's EDM 310 Class at the University of South Alabama!

We have talked alot in this class about:
Digital Natives
Incorporating Technology in education
Brainstorming new ways to use that technology
Great and helpful pieces of technology
...that are being used in classrooms

Our final project for the semester is this blog- which is about how to get started!
This blog is for students who would like to know things to enhance their blog, teachers who are just getting started incorporating technology in their classrooms, administration who may be weighing ideas concerning technology, and also for seasoned teachers familiar with using technology to contribute helpulness! Any feedback anyone would like to offer would be greatly appreciated.  Feel free to comment. This is the point of our blog!
We would also like to know what types of technology you would like to learn about.  Which "how-to's" would help you?