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Elementary School 2.0

Jul 16th, 2009
by pollyalida.
1 comment

Buffy Hamilton (The Unquiet Librarian) posted some great examples today of how elementary schools are using social media to communicate with faculty, parents & students. Read her post!

I wanted to highlight two of her examples from Christina Bentheim at the Dickens Elementary School in North Las Vegas, NV.

1: A wiki page chock full of resources for teacher, parents & students and with a great Glogster graphic as an interactive front page.

2: Her NetVibes information portal full of subject resources, a parenting section, teaching resources and more.

Blog Analysis Fun

Nov 13th, 2008
by pollyalida.
2 comments

Helene Blowers recently posted links to some fun blog analysis tools:

Here’s a list of a few fun blog analyzers that supposedly offer up some insights into your blog and writing style. Note: I can’t validate the scientific integrity of any of these tools. I share them here for your pure amusement purposes only :)

The tools and my results:

  • Typealyzer – Myers-Briggs type of test for your blog’s personality: My blog came out as ESTP – A “doer”, not where I usually test on these things. But my blog must have it’s own personality?

A DOER: The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking andnengaging in physical out-door activities.  The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

  • Genderanalyzer – My blog came out as strongly male! 80%.
  • Readability Test – And written at an elementary school reading level. Well, at least it’s very accessible. :-)
  • What is your blog worth – $3,951.78. Though I wouldn’t mind having that nearly $4,000 in my pocket, I guess I’m not going to get rich quick.

Have some fun analyzing your own blog or somone else’s!

FeedMyInbox – super easy rss to email

Oct 16th, 2008
by pollyalida.
No comments yet

FeedMyInbox is a fairly new tool for getting RSS content via email. And it’s dead simple to use. Enter the URL for the feed and your email address. That’s it! You’ll get an email with a confirmation link and then you’ll start getting a single email every 24 hours for each feed you’ve subscribed too.

If you don’t know whether a site has an RSS feed, just enter the URL for the site itself. FeedMyInbox checks for you. If there’s more than one feed (try npr.org for example) you’ll get a list of feeds to choose from. Pretty slick.

And for bloggers who want to provide readers with quick way to let users sign up for their blog via email, create a link to FeedMyInbox and add your feed address on the end like this:

http://www.feedmyinbox.com/?feed=http://your.url.here

Plop it somewhere on the sidebar of your blog and you have an easy way to reach readers who aren’t using RSS feed readers.

Try it out: Subscribe to Polly’s Blog

There are other tools, like FeedBurner, that do this same thing by providing a box to put on the sidebar of your blog (see the right side of my blog). But I’ve found FeedBurner is a bit daunting to new bloggers.