I'm hoping to start off today with what I had intended to do with my group. As I'm working with the be novice/beginner group, I want to make sure that the basics are covered and then move on. With this in mind, my plan was to spend a little time on:
Saving the image to a previously created Image folder
Have the participants save 10 to 20 images for future use
Have a look at 'Advanced Searches' using Google
Keyboarding Sites - this is a skill that is vital in order to be really efficient in preparing and working with the different tools - (http://www.alline.org/euro/games/typing.html
Create an account using (preferably) their Gmail account
Register a new blog
Create a 'post'
Insert an image
Change the theme - appearance
The next exercise would be to have the teachers create groups based on their disciplines and discuss how they see a blog could be used. After their discussions - the teachers would then post a blog entry which summarizes how they see how a blog could be used in their discipline.
We'll look at a few more features that teachers could use in their blog - for example, embedding a video from youtube.com. Youtube has developed into an excellent resource of information. Of course, there are video's that will need to be screened out. Having said this, if one takes the time, he/she will find some classroom ready videos. As well, the embedding process is very similar among the various web tools. For this reason, knowing how to carry out this process will allow the teachers to use it in other areas.
Another area to consider is the work that is carried out from the 'dashboard'. Virtually all blogs and wikis have a dashboard related feature. This is the backbone of the tool where all faucets of the program come be controlled. The mere awareness will provide the users the starting point to access when working within these tools.
Using the dashboard, we'll look at a few more of the features available:
sharing with others
modifying pages and posts
working with comments posts on their blog
'Widgets' - looks of little add ons to enhance the layout of the blog
