Today I am leading a workshop for the Small Learning Communities grant at the OCDE. I’ll be working with coordinators from 9 schools to build a team blog and wiki at edublogs.org and wikispaces.org. The idea is to extend and enhance their communication and collaboration between their monthly face to face meetings.
Here is a link to my (admittedly sparse) powerpoint slides. (UPDATE: Ha! My slides did not transfer to Windows well at all, as I discovered in the PC lab used for the session. With any luck this PDF of the handout fares much better.)
After the session I will offer a link to the new OCDE SLC team blog. (UPDATE: 9 site coordinators and the 2 grant coordinators all created WordPress blogs today, and they all joined a single team blog at ocslc.edublogs.org. Some of their other blogs are linked from there. Right now you will find mostly test posts, but with any luck a meaningful conversation will develop there… they were certainly appreciative after 90 minutes that went by too fast.)
Also, I did some testing just now and want to offer this quick rundown of user roles in WordPress, so the SLC coordinators can choose which they want to use. (I also post these here because a straightforward search didn’t turn these up when I looked, so here they are.)
- Subscribers have only the Dashboard and Profile tabs.
- Contributors have these plus the Write and Manage tabs.
- Authors have the same, but presumably with greater rights.
- Editors gain the Links tab.
- Administrators have access to all tabs.
As you can tell, I am transitioning my training sessions away from blogger as well. It’s a little bit sad, but I’m excited about WordPress, particularly the comment features. And I don’t think any of these educators will miss moblogging. ;)
UPDATE: The most missed feature in the transition from Blogger to Edublogs? The ability to upload pictures! I’m not sure the comment feeds and category features I was so excited about are quite so meaningful to beginning bloggers… and the trade off may not have been worth it in this case. I’ll need to weigh my choice of blog platform versus specific needs of the participants in the future. There may even be a Blogger versus WordPress post in my future.
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