Evolving whiteboard notes

I have used whiteboard notes for each of my classes systematically for the last three school years.

This started using open office, but moved to googledocs to take advantage of full screen and automatic publishing. This has proved a useful way of keeping and sharing a fairly complete record of what happens in each class. It has proved especially useful for journal mapping and for absent students and just to remind me of the flow of the class.

There are a couple of things that cause me to reevaluate this process now:

 – googledocs is retiring the full page format I have previously used. I don’t see this as a real problem as there will be some plain margins down the side and everything else seems to remain intact. Hopefully that is all the update will change.

– it doesn’t fit with RSS. This is a bigger issue as we are encouraging students and parents to use an RSS aggregator to keep up with what is going on. This means that parents could set up a bundle of feeds for all their kids classes that will get updated automatically. As a parent I can appreciate the benefit of this. If parents are really doing this it would be useful to take advantage of it, but I don’t see any easy way to do that. From my point of view it is important that the process is an actual part of my teaching rather than an after class add on. A blog post a day would not work effectively for update during class or clarity of presentation, and would be untidy with the flow of classes.

It looks like it may be time for a bit of research

Advertisement

RSS and blog posts

The grade 7s spent a bit of a lesson posting a blog note about their poster project. I think this was a good way of having an accessible reminder of this project and went well with the picture record. For one group a few of them managed to give some peer review comments as well which is a good opportunity that would be difficult to reproduce in such an easy way to share.
Most of them seemed to be confident accessing their blogs and sorting out how to get a picture from flickr across, though some needed some guidance.
Looking through the blog pages there were some good examples but several who had not successfully posted – not sure why.
I tried to find a way of putting all the posts onto a quick check page. I thought I would try a non-google thing since the reader doesn’t come with the school account, so I used shrook. This seemed a bit tiresome to set up – it would be better f this was done for a class as a service. Also, I couldn;t find one student and another was not on the blog page and I guessed a few addresses.
The reader is supposed to synch on two computers but it did not show as read items I had marked as such on one. This might make it less useful for tracking updates. Also, one rquired a password – should it not or should they all? Some things to get advice on here