I don’t know if this video is for real (this site suggests it is) but it sure gets you thinking about technology in a different way.

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.

I signed up with Diigo.com last year. Diigo is a social bookmarking site, very similar to Delicious. Both sites allow you to take the bookmarks that you would normally create in Explorer or Firefox and easily post them on a public website so that you can share them with other people. These are very handy sites for teachers (especially those who don’t know how to create a website) because they both allow you to setup a collection of links for a research assignment and then send your students to just one URL where all your sites are listed.

In other words, instead of separately writing down the websites and their URLs for my assignment on Sir John A Macdonald, and having the kids punch them into their browsers (and make lots of errors in the process) I can simply give them my Deliious link http://delicious.com/mrpuffin/sirjohna which has all the various sites listed.

Social bookmarking is handy on its own, but Diigo allows you to share bookmarks in a cool way. A group of people (students in my case) can share a common area to post their bookmarks. They can edit each other’s work and leave comments for each other.

This is really very cool for students collaborating on research projects. Yesterday I had students researching historical Canadian human rights issues pool their bookmarks in a Diigo group so they could each use the best of the material that the others had found. The login of the person who posted the link is put beside the posted link so you, as teacher, can easily see who’s contributing and who’s not. It’s quite easy to hold people accountable.

You also have an ability to edit most things. I haven’t checked out everything yet, but I think you can edit almost anything potentially offensive that your students could post.

There is an educator version of Diigo, as well, which allows you to create users (without them having to submit e-mail addresses) and create groups for your users to work in. Understandably, that’s incredibly useful in a classroom setting.

The only downside I’ve seen so far was the length of time it took Diigo to process my application for an educator account. I first applied last May and it seems to have been approved last week. Admittedly, all of this service is free (including the education upgrade) so I can’t really complain, but with the lagtime involved I wouldn’t plan on using Diigo really soon after you apply for it.

On Monday there was a train accident a block or two from school. The rumor going around was that it was a pedestrian-train accident. It’s something I find fairly amazing since there are an abudance of flashing lights and guard rails at that rail crossing, it seems amazing that anyone could not know a train was coming. Yet somehow all the the technology available didn’t prevent this collision.

That might reflect how responsibly we use technology. Technology can be used positively, or negatively but ultimately if it saves us or hurts us really depends on what we do with it. That point was brought home this week when I came across PleaseRobMe.com which looks how people use Twitter. I use Twitter to keep in touch with other teachers around the globe and share lesson ideas. It’s my source of professional development without even leaving the school.

Others don’t use Twitter in such a positive way. PleaseRobMe.com highlights the tweets on Twitter where someone has announced to the world that they are not at home and that, consequently, their home is available for burglaring.

Most people I know who use Twitter (or other social networks) will keep in contact with colleagues and learn from them, but having established a level of friendliness, they will very readily give out personal information in a very pubic way. You know exactly where they are within seconds of them announcing it.

PleaseRobMe.com highlights the need for caution when we use social networks. They can do so much to help us, but without safeguards, they can do so much to hurt us, too.