Tim Stahmer over at AssortedStuff has a nice new design for the new year.

Technorati Tags: Tim Stahmer

I was visiting the November Learning site tonight and learned that they are no longer offering free hosting for teachers…

November Learning is no longer offering free blogs. For those who currently have accounts on our system, please be advised that our free blogging service will only be available up until August 1, 2006. After that time, you will have the opportunity to purchase an individual account in our software. If you choose not to pay the subscription fee your blog will no longer be available.

The site does mention that they have moved to a new weblog platform, but it doesn’t indicate what that platform is… It looks like James Farmer’s Edublogs.org is the best bet for no cost sites for educators. I set up an edublog site for my last class at Pacific University and plan to use it again this spring. James is also an active blogger and his Blogsavvy site is one that I visit daily.

Technorati Tags: edublogs.org, November Learning, James Farmer

NECC Talking Points:
Blogging in the Classroom

Over at eSchoolNews ETI, Tom Hoffman answers viewer mail regarding the use of weblogs in the classroom. Tom discusses Pat Delaney’s idea of weblogs and wikis as digital paper. I tend to agree.

This year at Lewis Elementary four teachers have been using wikis installed on their laptops to provide digital paper to their students. If you would like to learn more about our use of Instiki, take a look here and here, and can listen to our O’Reilly talk here.

Next school year we plan to have weblogs set up for students running on our internal network. On Monday our X Serve was upgraded to 10.4.0 Tiger. The Tiger version of X Serve comes with a built in weblogging package called Blojsom. Blojsom is based on the Blosxom weblog tool that was developed by Rael Dornfest.

Today I spent a few minutes on the server, clicked a few check boxes, and in a matter of minutes I had set it up so that every user on our server has a weblog. Over the summer we plan to add accounts for all of our 4th and 5th grade students and provide them with this digital paper. We will also spend some time with the teachers sharing tools such as RSS readers and showing them how easily they can keep track of student work and make timely responses.

Am looking forward to attending NECC next week and having some time to talk to folks at Apple and learning more about this feature of OS X Server.

> How To: Start Your Own Blog > May 15, 2005″ href=”http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163100418″>Techlearning > > How To: Start Your Own Blog > May 15, 2005 Technology & Learning magazine has a good article on starting a blog. It is written by Tim Stahmer of Assorted Stuff. The article is a good introduction for teachers just learning about weblogs, and gives good step by step instructions for setting up a weblog on Blogger. Also the article reveals the name of Tim’s “overly large school district on the Virginia side of Washington DC” where he is employed…

The other night, The Daily Show had a great piece on CNN’s new blogging feature. It basically is two young woman sitting in front of computer screens reading blogs. Stewart gets in some great comments. Lisa Rein has the clip…

Yahoo! 360° - What is Yahoo! 360°? Yahoo is soon to release Yahoo! 360, their photo sharing and blogging tool…

Week in Review > Postings From the Edge: A Catastrophe Strikes, and the Cyberworld Responds” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/weekinreview/02blog.html?ex=1262322000&en=6d233db45276c28e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland”>The New York Times > Week in Review > Postings From the Edge: A Catastrophe Strikes, and the Cyberworld Responds

AFTER an earthquake in the Indian Ocean sent tsunamis smashing into coastal Asia and East Africa, much of the initial information about what had happened came from the World Wide Web, especially from the personal journals called weblogs, or blogs. Here are excerpts from Web postings about the catastrophe.

New York Times piece by Peter Edidin. A listing of partial posts from weblogs about the tragedy…