Heidi Olson

Look here for a short list of the some new features found in the upgrade to Blackboard in Version 8. Highlights of the Discussion Board and GradeCenter, as well as features of new tools coming soon!

Ever wonder who is reading your blog? I ran across this widget that you can load into your blog’s sidebar that shows where your readers are coming from and how they got there. Often your blog might be linked from another blog or website. Its always interesting to see how people got to your site.

This widget is called Feedjit. With Feedjit you can see:

• Which city and country your visitors are in
• Which website they arrived from, if any
• Which page they visited on your website
• Which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any

It gives you to option of using a live traffic feed or a live traffic map. If you use blogger or typepad you can quickly add it to your sidebar. If you are using another platform, Feedjit says:

If you use a different platform or if you’re installing Feedjit in a website, then simply cut and paste the script we provide into your blog template or website HTML. Feedjit will appear in the position you paste the script.

They also say that if you’re using a free account from wordpress.com then you won’t be able to use feedjit. If you have your own installation of wordpress you can modify your template with their code and add it to your site.

If your visitors don’t want to be seen there is an option link that they can click and remove themselves from your list.

Here’s what it looks like on my personal blog:

I’ve become a big fan of “toread+“. I have it in my toolbar in my Firefox 3 browser.

When I’m researching a topic I usually start with a search in a search engine and begin to gather websites that contain interesting and relevant content. I open links as I find them in new tabs in my browser. At some point I get overwhelmed by the number of tabs or I find a sufficient amount of information that I’m looking for and then I start to sift through it. Most often I find myself spending way too much time on it and decide to move on to another task before completing my research. I don’t really want to muddle up my bookmarks with links to these open tabs since I probably won’t need them more than once or twice. I could move them to my delicious.com social bookmarking account but once, again, they aren’t necessarily topics that I want to keep and the links may not have relevance to others who are following my newly added delicious feeds. I may not have had time to determine if they are really good resources and want to be reminded to look back at them. I also don’t want to spend too much time finding these links again as I probably want to get back to the topic within a day or two.

This is where” toread+” comes in. Like I mentioned before, I have it showing as a link on my toolbar so while I’m on a web page that I want to be reminded of I can click the link and I can send myself an email that has the web address listed in it. I also have the capability to add a short comment about the link so I can customize the email’s subject line.

This also works well for me when I’m in a meeting/conference/class/presentation and someone mentions a web address that I want to get back to when I have more time to spend on it. I can send myself an email reminder and then determine how important it is to me to keep at a later time. I normally don’t keep one of these emails in my inbox more than a day or so. I find time to determine the webpage’s importance and then move on and delete it or give it permanent home in one of my other social tools.

For me, using email to manage things like this has been working well. I know that some people prefer not to fill up their inbox with a lot of messages so this tool might not appeal to them. I’m able to keep a pretty clean inbox and archive (or trash) most of my incoming mail, move tasks to a todo list (I use todoist), send bookmarks to delicious, or categorize my messages.

For more information look at: http://toread.cc/howtouse.php

There’s also a tool called Read it Later – I haven’t tried it yet but I’m thinking about installing it and seeing if it has more features that work with my work style. In fact, I found several references to it yesterday and used my toread+ tool to send myself a couple of links as email reminders!

Creating a presentation using Sketchcast can be a quick way to demonstrate a concept that would benefit from an explanation along with a creating a visual. Here’s an example of a math problem, an example of a chemistry problem, and an example of brainstorming and creating a editorial cartoon. In the first two examples I don’t think the creators used a digital tablet which would probably have helped. Its hard to draw with a mouse or a laptop trackpad–I know that its hard for me. The last example was created by an accomplished artist!

An additional feature is that you (or your students) can post comments but you have to create an account to do so (but that just takes a minute to do). Comments would be open to the general public so you might get comments from a wide audience which might greatly enhance the discussion.

Another great feature is that you can set up an individual channel and have a series of presentations within this channel. The channels have an RSS feed attached to them so if you used a feed reader (like googlereader, bloglines, etc.) you’d be notified if anything new had been added to someone’s channel.

Too bad that you aren’t able to use tagging to further identify your presentation and to help in searching. This would be a nice feature for them to add in an update version.