Welcome IPT 286 students!

For the next 4-8 months, this blog will be dedicated to my Instructional Psychology and Technology 286 classes. I will be using this blog to discuss ideas related to the integration of technology in grades 9-12 with my students.

If you are one of these students, welcome! Feel free to look around and try out the blogging technology if you've never used it. Post a comment if you like to this post and tell me about yourself so I can get to know you! There are helpful links to the right for starting your own weblog (blog) as well as some links to helpful educational technology links. There is also my "blogroll," which is a list of some of the blogs I read often. You may start by checking these out. I know we have about a dozen English majors in our class. You should especially look at Will Richardson's Weblogged and Barbara Ganley's bgblogging. These are a couple of great teachers who use blogs to teach high school writing. Those of you in other disciplines, try searching for some great educational weblogs in your area and let us know when you find some!

GETTING STARTED: If blogs are new to you, get started by making your own blog at blogger.com. They have pretty easy directions, but if you get lost, let me know. You'll need to sign up for a free Bloglines aggregator, too. An aggregator is what allows you to read the blogs that you "subscribe" to. It's like getting a daily newspaper of the stuff you want to read, and none of the stuff you don't. You subscribe to your favorite blogs, and the aggregator compiles the stuff from these blogs so you can read them all at once. It's very helpful.

You might also read up about blogs on the Wikipedia site. It might help you understand this technology. You can also download this short article by Dave Wiley of USU. He's one of the current leaders in educational uses of blogs.

NEW TUTORIAL! I just barely created a tutorial to walk you through how to set up a blog for our class. Enjoy!

Have fun exploring! If you are on campus and would like to meet with me and get your blog started before class gets going, email me when you would like to meet. I'm here almost every day, all day.