Educational Technology – Lisa Toulon

Originally posted to the Illinois Technology Conference for Educator’s Blog – March 1, 2006

I had the pleasure of spending the day with Susim Munshi and Susan Switzer at their Read, Write, and Blog workshop. They have a wonderful support website using 21publish.com at http://learn2blog.21publish.com/ Excellent blog examples are included under the Blog List drop down menu – see “Learning from Reading Blogs” and “Learning from Participation in Blogs”. Also under the Blog List, are some Case Studies. These are scenerios which will be very familiar to teachers. Questions are listed below each to guide the teacher in utilizing blogs with a more constructivist approach to teaching and learning. We then got the opportunity to explore a free blogging publishing community called 21publish. Individual student blogs can be set up under a main umbrella blog like the North River School Blogs or topics for students to comment on like the Learn2Blog site.

Thanks for a wonderful day Susim and Susan.

So how did Mike, from BlinkList, find my posting on my blog so fast? (see Jan. 4th post)  I went straight to the source and asked him myself.  He used technorati, a blog search engine.   How does this search engine work?  According to their site,

“Because Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who’s linking to whom) underlying these conversations.”

You can search by keyword, website URL, or the tag which the blogger has assigned to the post.  Very cool.  Thanks for the recommendation, Mike. 

Other Blog Search Engines include: Blogdigger, Bloglines, BlogPulse, BlogSearchEngine, Bloogz, Daypop, Feedster, Google Blog Search, IceRocket and PubSub.  The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about this called “New Search Engines
Help Users Find Blogs.”