NECC Talking Points:
Blogging in the Classroom

Over at eSchoolNews ETI, Tom Hoffman answers viewer mail regarding the use of weblogs in the classroom. Tom discusses Pat Delaney's idea of weblogs and wikis as digital paper. I tend to agree.

This year at Lewis Elementary four teachers have been using wikis installed on their laptops to provide digital paper to their students. If you would like to learn more about our use of Instiki, take a look here and here, and can listen to our O'Reilly talk here.

Next school year we plan to have weblogs set up for students running on our internal network. On Monday our X Serve was upgraded to 10.4.0 Tiger. The Tiger version of X Serve comes with a built in weblogging package called Blojsom. Blojsom is based on the Blosxom weblog tool that was developed by Rael Dornfest.

Today I spent a few minutes on the server, clicked a few check boxes, and in a matter of minutes I had set it up so that every user on our server has a weblog. Over the summer we plan to add accounts for all of our 4th and 5th grade students and provide them with this digital paper. We will also spend some time with the teachers sharing tools such as RSS readers and showing them how easily they can keep track of student work and make timely responses.

Am looking forward to attending NECC next week and having some time to talk to folks at Apple and learning more about this feature of OS X Server.