Good post from another good ed blog

Back from Thanksgiving, hope yours was happy and that you are enjoying a few extra days off before the downhill slide into the holiday season.

Here is a great post from a kindred blogger that gives a nice glimpse into the same efforts and struggles that Canadian teachers are facing when incorporating Web 2.0 in the classroom. Not only does it detail one teacher's efforts, but it's also a good primer for some of the technologies that I will be discussing later in this blog.

EDES 501 Web 2.0 Learning Log

I found this article by setting up a Google Alert, a lo-fi news aggregator that trolls the web and delivers content to my Gmail account based on keywords that I plug in. It allows me to constantly search the web for very specific news items and blog posts without having to do searches every 10 minutes for the newest content. Sure, some of the results I get are useless, but then a gem like this comes along and makes it all worthwhile. It's also a good way to hone your search terms to get the content that you want. For example I had not been using "Web 2.0 in the classroom" as a search term, but instead was searching for "blogging in the classroom, podcasting in the classroom, new media in the classroom..." Now that I've gotten such a great result, I can redefine what I'm searching for to take a step toward better results in the future.

In the above-linked post, there is also a link to a list of the Top 100 tools for Learning that I am about to dig into. I'll post the greatest hits here next time, so stay tuned.