Some thoughts from Ryan Eby on educational uses of trackback. When students have assignments they have to do on their weblog, it'd probably be helpful to have a page that describes the assignment which they can ping when they post... [Brooklyn BloggEd]

Joe Luft points to a post by Ryan Eby (Ryan's site is great) regarding the possible uses of Trackback in educational settings. Joe mentions that he utilizes an RSS aggregator to read his students' work. I do this too, but one of the things about Trackback that is interesting is that with assignments, the instructor can leave it to the students to make the connection to the assignment, instead of having to subscribe to each students RSS feed in a newsreader. Also I'm thinking of some of the teachers out there who may not be familiar with a news aggregator.

I've been spending some time learning more about Movable Type and some of the plug-ins that others have written to expand its capibilities. For example MT-RSS feed is a Movable Type plug-in that allows for the import of RSS feeds into pages. On the Buckman home page are two examples of this. The school media specialist is using Movable Type to create a list of recommended books. This feed is incorporated into the school home page. In addition, Helen Nolen, the school principal, has been keeping a Movable Type page and this too is noted and fed to the school index page.

Learned of another MT plug-ing called Otherblog. Otherblog allows you to incorporate posts/info from other blogs on the same Movable Type installation. I hope to find some time today to incorporate this one to bring the latest book recommendation into the school home page.