How to make an RSS feed for a Wordpress category? This is surprisingly easy.
Just add /feed to the end of a category’s URL. For example, here is the URL for my KM category:
http://e-wot.com/category/km/
And here is the RSS feed for my KM category:
http://e-wot.com/category/km/feed
Twitter. I follow people who share the most amazing stuff. Follow me: Markhamster – and then follow the people I’m following (for a start). I use Tweetdeck (iPhone too).
Feedly. It’s the best rss feed aggregator. It’s a Firefox addon. I’ll list my feeds in another post.
Buzz out loud. The best podcast about all things tech (CNet). Intelligent, and heated discussions by people who really know what they’re talking about. I listen to this on my iPhone on the way to work. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory.
Buzz report. A vodcast (also from CNet) anchored by Molly Wood (she’s great: smart, passionate & funny). I watch this on my iPhone. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory.
GeekBrief.TV. A vodcast – Cali Lewis anchors. Gadgets, interviews, etc… I watch this on my iPhone. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory too.
For best results, subscribe to the pod/vodcasts in iTunes so they download onto your computer (you won’t have to watch and wait while they play – they’ll just play). I download them overnight, or while I’m having breakfast.
Here’s a list of online apps (games, chat, forums, social networks, blogs) with the age restrictions as seen in the sites’ terms of service/use. I made this list because I needed a list to show some teachers what they could/could not use with their students depending on age. This list is by no means complete, just a few online apps I’ve heard about.
This is purely informational. I haven’t tried them all, so I can’t say how well they safeguard minors. It’s best to be thorough and try them out properly yourself. YMMV
Ones I’ve tried and I think are good, though not with age restrictions in mind: Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook, Ning, Club Penguin, FreeRealms, Writeboard, 21Classes, PBwiki & Delicious.
RPG = Role Playing Game
Must be at least 16
Must be at least 13 and in high school
Must be over 13
Download & install application required
No Age minimum specified, but require parental approval
Download & install application required
I couldn’t find anything definitive about age restrictions on Wikispaces, EduBlogs or 21Classes, but considering that they’re aimed at teachers and learners, I’m guessing that they must be OK for all ages?? I couldn’t find anything in PBworks’ (PBwiki), or Delicious‘ Terms of Service mentioning age either.
As a rule of thumb, when checking out an online tool that you might want to use with younger learners, check the Terms of Service (sometimes called Terms of Use) and their privacy policy. This should be somewhere on the homepage (usually at the bottom). Then do an inline search (hit Ctrl+F) for ‘years’ or ‘guardian’ or ‘13′ or something like that to jump to the bit about age restrictions, and then read the small print.
By the way, blogging tool tumblr. requires subscribers to be over 18.
And thanks to Denis for helping me with the list.
Interesting post and comments on Weblogg-ed. It’s about new literacies, cyber-bullying and the roles of teachers and parents, the curriculum, etc… The comments are full of good links and stuff. Worth a look.
I tried to post this as a comment to the post, but couldn’t. So I’ve posted here instead.
First up, it made me think of the Byron Review Report commissioned by the UK Prime Minister: Safer Children in a Digital World I can highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it before. I particularly like this quote:
“Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.”
Second, I thought of a course a colleague’s just written. We were recently given the opportunity to write a teacher training course in ‘Media Literacy’ for teachers in Singapore schools. One of the main focuses of the course is to develop knowledge and skills to enable the critical evaluation of different types of content across the different media available today. Helping teachers to empower children by helping them to understand, assess and manage risks – so they can make better choices.
Third, I thought of another colleague who’s helping secondary students to use blogs responsibly, by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than they’d resorted to before. link to e-wot post
The last two aren’t a direct attempt to ‘teach’ ‘cyber-wellness’, instead they do something which I think is more powerful. They help develop the literacies which are the foundations of better risk management and self-regulation.
Earlier today I was at a presentation by Nick Potts, from the British Council Singapore, on the lessons he’s learned from two years of using blogs with lower secondary students in Singapore. He gave an account of all the problems, lessons learned and he also shared strategies he’s worked out to overcome these challenges.
His main point was that these students tend to view (and use) blogs as a means to vent their feelings. He showed us how this manifested in free-form rants, which were far from the aims of his lessons. He confirmed this by showing us the results of survey he asked some students to complete last week.
He was quick to admit that his first attempt at using blogs with these students at integrating blogs into his classes resulted in work that (at best) lacked focus, and (at worst) had these teenagers revealing things about themselves that he was concerned might expose them to risk if the blogs had been in a public space on the web. His blogs were all closed to public access – he chose to use 21 Classes to help address these concerns by keeping the blogs closed and viewable only by his class.
His strategy for dealing with the challenge included setting clearly focused writing tasks, not calling the blog a ‘blog’ in class (instead refering to it as a portal) and starting the blog with very positive and simple writing activities.
One teacher in the audience asked if Nick had used this blogging exercise to explore issues of cyber-wellness and safe practices for minors online. Nick pointed out that he only saw them for two hours a week, so he didn’t have time to explore these issues with his class, although if he had time he would have liked to. It seemed to me that he had already helped his students toward managing these risks by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than those they’d resorted to before.
Here’s Nick’s presentation:
Posterous. A great tool for uploading anything (mp3s, photos, videos, files…) to a web page by e-mail. Dead easy: you email the file to post@posterous.com and the site does the rest.
Awesome.
Twitter: Markhamster
