Netvibes

We started blogging at SSIS last year in September using Edublogs. Although I really like edublogs and the support I was given the issues we had with blogging due to our lack of bandwidth made the experience fairly painful.

I was pushing for a local install of wordpressmu and moodle so that bandwidth would not be a major factor in the use of web based tools at SSIS. Fortunately, at the EARCOS 08 admin conference administration found out that

other schools were moving in this direction and decided it would be a good move for our school as well.

At that point I was using Netvibes and Greader to collect the students RSS feeds as I wanted to use a Netvibes page to collect and showcase student writing. You can see the edublog feeds above. I did not really like the widget view that you had with Netvibes so in the end I used a shared Greader feed to display student work.

I see there have been some changes with Netvibes. You are now allowed to view the feeds in what I feel is a better way: a reader view. In this view you can to see your feed in, a list, an expanded view (with the whole blog post), or a mosaic mode (looks like it pulls a graphic from the blog post) with individual feeds and categories shown along the left hand side.

As you can see above they have also added a few other items to their feeds. Still think the current system we have in our wordpressmu blogs of collecting RSS feeds into a teacher blog is the best way of displaying students work but these Netvibes changes are quite nice.

Graphics were captured using Snagit for Mac beta version. Works quite well so far!

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