This year I was assigned a computer media course to teach which intimidated me since I really don’t know that much about that stuff. Clearly, I learned at least as much as the kids did. I also learned (again) that sometimes you need to give the kids freedom to play with your media toys and they’ll do some things that would have never occurred to you to try. One of the better projects told the story of Cinderella with the help of a few green screen effects.  The students uploaded their video to YouTube, so you can judge for yourself what you think of it.

For one of my classes I try to have the kids blog regularly. It’s a hard thing to do from a technical point of view. There are very few inexpensive or free sites where I can have the students write and yet maintain a bit of control over their writing in case they say something inappropriate. A lot of blog sites also require users to have an e-mail address. That’s less of an issue for me as a high school teacher, but it’s a real concern for elementary teachers.

I have used 21 Classes. It’s a nice site with fairly easy to figure out controls. When I first tried it out they let you sign up 50 students for free. That’s been cut back to 10 which isn’t terribly useful. For $8.95/month you can raise that to 100, but with classroom budgets under strain it’s not easy to find $89.50/year for blogging.

KidBlog seems to be a new and cool solution to the problem. For those who blog on other sites, it seems to run off a WordPress engine (which I like). From the teacher’s point of view, it allows you to create sttudents without them having to have e-mail. You can set it so student posts must be approved by you first, and you can even keep your whole blogging coummunity private  if you like.

KidBlog also allows you to set up multiple teachers/administrators on one account, and seems to have some way to link the kids to more than one class. This opens up room for collaboration between teachers and classes which could have interesting possibilities at the high school end of things.

As far as appearances go, KidBlog offers only two templates for personalizing your site. It’s not much, but this isn’t a crucial issue unless you’re hyper sensitive about their design choices.

KidBlog is free at this point and there’s no indication that any change is in the works. It looks like a pretty cool blogging platform that will satisfy almost any teacher, and almost any administrator.

Though kind of partial to Firefox, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to whatever the latest web browser version is. For most things you do it doesn’t really matter.

However, Opera has just released a new version of their browser that they’re calling “Unite” because it pulls a whole lot of services together. While it’s a pretty decent web browser (though it feels different from Firefox) it can also help you set up a simple webserver, chat room and a few other neat features that run entirely off your home (or possibly work) computer.

Though it’s now comparatively easy to get a good chat room, there are times I’ve hunted  for one that was private and safe for my students and I couldn’t find one. Having one running on my home computer would solve that since its existence would be known only to me (and my students), hence there would be no creepy people there that I’d have to worry about.

A webserver running on your computer can also give you a bit of privacy when sharing webpages with photos, student work, etc.

The real great part with this is that it’s all designed for the non-geek. Setup time for me was about five minutes (but I’m a bit geeky so it might be longer for you). It’s really, really simple.

The two downsides to this that I can see are that the URLs for the services are ridiculously clunky. For example, for a webserver your URL might be mycomputer.user.operaunite.com/webserver. It doesn’t exactly role off the tongue. This might be fixed in a later version of the Opera browser.

The second problem is  a little more fundamental. Though most people can download to their computer fairly quickly, in most cases uploading from your computer is comparatively slow. Upload speeds (which is what will matter when someone downloads a webpage from your computer, if you follow) are quite slow in most cases. This may make your webserver, or chat room, etc seem comparatively clunky.

Despite the flaws I think Opera is on to something with this new version of their browser. Good job, guys.

Via Dogtrax’ blog comes news of this rather incredible web publishing tool. If you’ve ever looked for a way to quickly and easily get a document onto the web without all the tedious mucking about with HTML, File2.ws presents a pretty cool solution. They claim to be able to convert just about anything to a webpage so if you’ve got Word docs, spreadsheets or whatever that you want to get up where people can see them, this site may be the world’s simplest way to do it.

The site is supported with ads – which is hardly outrageous – but it does mean you have to be a bit cautious when using this with students. Unlike Google ads, the ones I saw seemed to have no connection with the content of the page. Consequently the nature of the ads may not always be appropriate to school age kids.

I’ve been having the kids in my Applying Information and Communication Technology 2 15 F class (gotta love the short, snappy course name!) build websites as one of the their projects.

They’ve been using Weebly for the exercise. Weebly is a really amazing site that allows you to create your own website using one of their subdomains (something.weebly.com) or lets you attach your own domain name (for free on their part) if you know how to do the technical stuff.

There’s a lot of cool templates and lots of easy things you can pull into you site like YouTube videos and a long series of pictures.

The only thing you give away is a single line at the bottom of every page that says “Create a free website with Weebly.” That’s hardly a high price to pay for something like this.

While the projects, as they get done, are fairly amazing, we are having some frustrations with Weebly. It’s sometimes, and inconsistently, difficult to edit text, or delete parts you’ve added to a page. The inconsistency suggests that the bugs aren’t completely ironed out on Weebly’s end. Adding YouTube videos is a bit cumbersome and hardly intuitive.

I imagine these things will all be ironed out as Weebly grows, and so I’d readily recommend Weebly for classroom activities or personal use.