A Blog for All Seasons

Keith Heningburg (History) stopped by to review options for a class blog. He has a Manila site but I'll be showing him Blogger, a Google tool.

This means Keith can create a blog for each class he teaches. Each blog automatically includes an RSS feed. "A what?" you ask. Blogs are ideal for quick posts that can be shared with students by subscription. So by adding a new post, this "news" is broadcast to subscribers. Actually the New Media @ City blog has an RSS feed and I'm hoping you keep track of your colleagues this way. To review what Blogger has to offer, see the Help pages or view the Blogger Videos posted to YouTube. RSS feeds can be added to Manila pages, websites, browsers (Firefox and Safari) or appear on smart phones! 

One interesting Blogger feature is the option to email a post directly to your blog. This answers another question Keith had ... "How do I forward campus announcements to students?" When a message appears in his Outlook Inbox, he can copy the message to a new email and edit it for his student audience, then press the Send button. The message will be posted to the blog and any subscribed students will get the information on their computer or smart phone. Well, that's what the description says. We'll test it out and let you know ... in a new blog post here.

Smart Tech = Low Tech

Richi Kroupa (Japanese) stopped by with questions about how to provide class handouts to her students. Since SCC is between learning management systems, and this semester's D2L training will begin in late February the ideal solution was to create a web server account.

Many faculty have wserver accounts for websites managed through FrontPage or Dreamweaver or iWeb. Other faculty post content to the wserver and then link to these files from Blackboard or D2L.

In Richi's case, she will give the exact URLs to students for now and they can access the handouts any time.

One additional twist was to convert her Word documents to PDF (Acrobat) files and post them. It was easy to see why. In looking a the PDF version the browser automatically displayed the file in printable fashion - including the Japanese characters. The DOC or DOCX files would be best to download, just clicking the filename showed a 'character alphabet soup' instead of content.