Beyond School

Back in August, I posted a screencast called “What is Blogging?” for audiences, educational and otherwise, needing a basic introduction to the read/write aspects of this new world.

Since I’m sponsoring a Web 2.0 club at school this year, and also setting my AP Literature students up with their own WordPress MU blogs on our school’s site, I made a follow-up: “What is Blogging? Part 2: Using Technorati to Connect with Your Readers.” As the title suggests, this one addresses the connectivity afforded by Technorati, and walks viewers through creating a Technorati account, claiming a blog, linking to the Technorati blog page, and so forth. It also discusses Technorati authority, rankings, and other minutiae. I had a bit of fun modeling the real-world connectivity and wonderfully unpredictable networking by following Norwegian blogger Jan-Arve Overland’s link to the first “What is Blogging?” tutorial back to his blog, and modeling the real-world process by leaving a comment there.

In case you want a glimpse of my AP Literature classes’ blended learning slice, which is only now beginning to take shape on our class blog, I take a brief detour in the screencast. Feel free to visit the class blog and see the constellation of tools we’re starting to deploy – Diigo Group, ToonDo, Scribe Blogs (so far artless and shameful, but give us time – and if nothing else, admire the beautiful WordPress theme I installed by Sadish at WP Themeshop), individual blogs, Moodle, Quotiki, wikis, Bloglines, and more.

Too much, you say? I would have feared the same last year, but not this year, thanks to another takeaway from the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last week – Alan November’s argument to throw our schoolified youngsters into the icy seas of info-glut that are the realities of this century, and force them to learn to swim now – rather than damn them to drowning, unprepared, after they graduate.

So here it is. I know it’s basic, but haven’t found a resource introducing this essential Technorati piece to students and teachers, so figured I’d just make one. For a larger, clearer, annotated version, click the video to go to my Screencast-o-matic Edtech tutorials channel. (I also uploaded it to Google Video for embedding in sites that don’t accept SOM’s iframes format.)

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