During this year we created many blogs and we learned how to use each tool. All along, each student had the opportunity to have his/her own personalized page. The first one was the ecml blogs, in which we networked with members from all around the world.
The second account we created was on Flickr (site that belongs to Yahoo, a social site, used for web publishing. The main idea on Flickr was to post many pictures on any subject we wanted, and anyone connected to the site could access them. We could also add friends to our list to facilitate access.
Then, we joined Bloglines, which is a site where we added the links of blogs that interested us, and we could read on one page all this person’s posts.
Once we realized our first blog (the ecml) server was too slow, the teacher taught us how to transfer a blog page to another blog. And so we started using WordPress, which offered us much more options such as adding video to a post, dragging posts from other sites directly to our page, creating a blogroll, etc.
This account on WordPress allowed us to create a list of links that permanently appear on our page. Since going on other pages became so practical, we were stimulated to join more social sites such as 43 Things and 43 Places.
43 Things is a site where we have to write down the things we want, our wishes and dreams, and where we could see who else want the same things and discuss about them. 43 Places works according to the same principle, except that instead of things, we list and comment about the places we want go to or recommend.
Little by little, more sites were included in our repertoire, and, in order to bring all our posts together in one page we created an account on Superglu. But in August/September, Flickr, 43 Things and 43 Places created a mash-up system and Superglu lost a bit of its utility. Now we can post directly from those sites to WordPress.
Another social site we joined was Community Walk. This is a very interesting site, where we had a satellite photo of the world. We could create our own map by adding marks on places we chose on the map, writing posts about that spot, adding pictures, defining paths, etc.
Finally, we joined a site called del.icio.us which aggregates our favorite links. It recovers bookmarks from anywhere. We can see other people’s bookmarks and add them to ours.
What I liked the most was the WordPress blog, not only because it offered many tools, but especially because it had good options of layout, and to me, that is very important because it’s what first strikes my attention.
Pictures appear in an acceptable size, not too big, not too small; we can write as much as we want; we can put a list of other sites linked…
But, as regards to the sites we joined, I think that we should be able to choose to enter only those we were really interested in joining. For example, the del.icio.us site didn’t seem to me like a very useful thing. I mean, I don’t spend my free time looking at sites other people like. And I didn’t really see the use of 43 things and 43 places. Of course it’s a nice place to share ideas, and get hints of nice places to go, but after a while it gets a little tiring.
But all in all, I think we got to try out many things, so it was a very nice year.
I really think it’s a pity that the movie idea didn’t work. Unfortunately our class wasn’t motivated enough, but I think that it’s a great idea, and that it should be developed. Movies are more dynamic, it asks more creation, and on top of everything, it develops the communication: the student will have to make efforts to transmit his idea to his public. And since it’s not a very common media used in class, it will surely attract the whole class to get more involved in the project. Maybe it would also have been interesting to create one more folder on WordPress, called (for example) “My interests”, where students would put sites they like, that they identify themselves with. Consequently, they’d have to research the web, looking for subjects of their interest, and they would read more.
