Digication

I've been in touch with digication and they're going to add you both as users so we can really test things out. However, we might decide to abandon this right away. They gave me a quote for the department - 10 teachers, 20 students - for a little over $300 per year. For the whole MS and US it would cost THOUSANDS. Meanwhile, I still love how easy it is to use.

Ning--Growing on me!

As I work on the tutorial for Ning, I am really very impressed with it. Uploading photos and movies is VERY easy. I think it might almost be more useful for what I have in mind for my 6th grade classes than pbwiki. I have a fairly specific set of purposes and I don't really have a lot of HW assignments as I would for a different type of class.

Ning

Ning allows you to set up your own social networking site, with a blog, comments, etc. We have set one up called ParkTechFACA2008. You can make the network private (invisible to others, and by invitation only). You can post photos and videos, create discussion groups and have blogs (each individual member has one). The administrator can preview and approve videos and photos before they are posted. This could be a good tool for a class to have discussions and share work.

The photo feature is very easy to use; it opens a window WITHIN THE NING PAGE that shows your computer's files on the left and you just drag and drop them into the upload area on the right. You can drag and drop multiple photos at once. You can tag photos as a group and individually before completing the upload. You can then create albums and filter them according to the tags.

Day 2, Carolyn

I'm building course pages on both pbwiki and moodle to compare their interactivity. Also looking at tumblr and flickr vs Adobe Bridge for ePortfolio use. I'm also feeling a little out of my league, especially when I see how quickly Elliott and Samira master this stuff. Guess I represent those people in our survey who said "tech...what's tech?"

ePortfolios

I'm looking at various ePortfolios to see whether any are more accessible than Adobe Bridge.