Spending a lot of my time now thinking about the best ways to use this beast I’ve unleashed on my kids. The real unknown here is how best to use the discussion feature (and as always, advice is welcomed). Now that it appears the author will be joining our book discussion in my lit class, I need to figure out the best way to use her input, and to get my students talking online too. I’ve spent some time this morning on Barbara’s and Karen’s sites, and I think I have some ideas. But I’m not quite clear…
Should I start conversations? If I do, should I do as Karen did and label them “Current Discussions”? (Still trying to figure out how she connects her discussion topics to the threaded discussion pages.) Should I ask the author to post her comments as news items on the home page? Or should I just have her check out these “current discussions” and respond. Then I could point to those responses from the home page. (And, as Barbara does so well, I should summarize the discussions going on throughout the site.)
I’ve posted some “model” content for my students, and I’m already worried that my plan to post everything as news and then sort it by departments may be a bit unruly…just too much to read. Perhaps I could link to those departments more prominently.
Still hard to see this all working without having seen how it works.
Good Morning Will!
Thought I’d respond as a way to either help clear your thinking or make the waters more muddy 🙂
With the departments issue, it seems to make perfect sense to make those links available….we tend to read the newspaper in sections, or departments if you will, and if someone wants to read sports, it would be great to be able to click on a link and get the sports section (or department). I’m not certain if this is what you were driving at or not…so let me know if you want to chat this one out.
As for the discussions musings above, I’m not sure if you mean (when you say “Still trying to figure out how she connects her discussion topics to the threaded discussion pages”) that question as a theoretical one or a practical one. If it is practical, then I simply put the blog in topic mode (prefs, advanced, newsitems) and had my blog organized by news days (also prefs, advanced, newsitems). If it is a theoretical question, I think I did that to avoid any confusion on the part of my new computer users and that I made that decision before I knew that you could block out images, stories, etc. from the listings in the discussion group (also done at prefs, advanced, newsitems).
Hope these comments are useful. Let me know if you need more.