I am sure there are several hundreds, if not thousands of these on the web at present. While at Oldbury Wells last week the students in 8RAC discussed what they thought should be rules for writing to a blog - I have put these rules into a wiki, feel free to edit and add rationale to each rule.
I have just received an email from Josie Fraser informing me that this years nominations for the EduBlog Awards are now open.
More details can be found here:
http://incsub.org/awards/2006/edublog-awards-2006-nominations-open/
Go on, get voting 
My latest podcasting adventure was at Priory school in Shrewsbury. Trina invited me in to work with a group of 20 Y10 students, prior to my visit she had worked with them to produce their scripts - this was done in Google Docs, and example of a script can be viewed here. As the students were working in groups the use of google docs to produce their scripts was ideal, all of the group could participate in producing the final script.
The podcasts were produced in Garageband, the final podcasts can be viewed/listened to below:
Alex, Nick & Absar (mp3 or m4a)
cfrd (mp3 or m4a)
Condoms (mp3 or m4a)
Hott Pink! (mp3 or m4a)
Matts Music (mp3)
Mindless Chatter, Pointless Talk (mp3)
The deputy headteacher was really impressed by the work that the students produced and the learning environment within the class, several of the students have asked if the school can buy Apple computers.
At the last Shropshire Advisory Service day I did a short demonstration of my blog and to show my readership I clicked on the clustrmap and then struggled to name some of the countries my readers come from.
Last week I was reading a post on the TecnoTeach blog entitled ‘Where did you say you were from?‘ the teacher appears to share my lack of geographical knowledge.
…. asking the children to start naming new locations as they appear on the map. Making this a game with the possibility of winning school house points has opened up a new curricular area in our blog that was not intentional. The children are now looking at the map, with interest, and locating marked areas as they have a desire to find out who their world wide audience are.
If you have a school blog, go and create a clustrmap now to develop your pupils’, and possibly your own, mapping skills.
This is a great idea and I wholesomely agree, put a clustrmap on your blog - not to record the number of hits your blog gets but where people are coming through. You could produce a huge world map on your classroom wall and insert pins in it when you get a visit from a new geographical region.
After a lot of looking and discussions with Dale I have now got a new theme on my blog, the theme I have chosen is Freshy 1.0
This theme allows a lot of customisation by individual users so I would recommend it to all ethink users, a couple of the key changes you can make include:
The theme is widget enabled allowing you to customise the whole of the sidebar components, including inserting html code and rss feeds.
So what do you think?
Following the two comments on my posting about web2.0 technologies I thought it would be worth explaining why I included Technorati.
When Ewan first visited last April he said that I should get my own blog so that I can share what I am doing with a wider audience, he obviously thought what I was saying was worth sharing.
So I took on his advice and that is when this blog surfaced properly, previously I had just used it to work out how to use a wordpress blog so that I could support schools/pupils wanting to set one up.
I now feel very much like the person in this cartoon, whenever someone tells me something interesting, something that I think the wider audience would like to hear about I say ‘have you put it on your blog?’. This seems strange as previous to me maintaining my blog I maintained part of a website, but I never said to people ‘have you put it on your website?’. Is it the medium that has made the difference or my philosophy that we should share and publish more and more.
Gareth Pimley has just started a blog for Primary D&T teachers, Gareth is an exceptional practitioner so his blog should be very informative.
Tony Karrer has posted ‘Top Ten Reasons to Blog and Top Ten Reasons Not to Blog‘ - they are lighthearted and amusing, does anyone have any other reasons..
To Blog:
Because Ewan said I should (Steve)Not to Blog:
Because Dale said I should, and I don’t like Dale to be right (Steve)
I think it could be quite interesting to get some of our students to come up with reasons to blog or not to blog, maybe if they can explain to the teachers who don’t read/write blogs why they could offer a huge benefit to learning more teachers might use them.
When Google released their RSS aggregator ‘Google Reader‘ a while back I signed up, as I tend to do with most new stuff from Google. I wasn’t overly impressed so I stuck with using Bloglines.
Last night I had an email that explained that Google Reader had been updated. I loaded it and was immediately impressed by the look and feel, a huge improvement. I have now uploaded my subscriptions to give it a full trial.
There are a host of attractive features:
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