SBISD EdTech Blog

The Spring Branch Educational Technology Department is in the process of creating a multimedia newsletter named ENTERactive that will be published four times a year. ENTERactive will incorporate video, sound, photo essays, animation, etc. so that we can begin to show some of the great and exciting things happening with technology in Spring Branch…but we need YOUR HELP!

ENTERactive will feature best practices throughout the district of teachers integrating technology into their curriculum. Do you know of a teacher who exemplifies this standard? A teacher who is innovative and “leading the way” in terms of seamlessly integrating technology into his/her curriculum? Then please tell us! Each edition of ENTERactive will feature between 3-6 teachers throughout the district who typifies what it means to integrate technology into their classroom curriculum.

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So…with Technorati (and Bloglines for that matter) blocked by the firewall, searching for good blog content within the district’s firewall can be daunting and frustrating. In the previous post I talked about some blog search engine alternatives. They ARE available (at least as of this writing) and ARE a search engine. But anyone who has used Technorati or Bloglines knows these are sloppy seconds to the top two blog search engines. Hopefully one day soon, Google Blog Search will get better…it just hasn’t been around as long as the other two.

So what do we do now if we’d like to search for good blog content? One really good alternative is to use del.icio.us as a search engine. I actually do it all the time…even from home when everything is available to me. I’ll tell you why and how here.

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How do you find good blog content “out there?” The blogosphere is a big place and some of it is filled with stuff we wouldn’t want to read or look at. HOW do you find people writing about content that interests us or is valuable to us as educators? How do you find information that we as educators want and NEED to read?

Good question

I attempt to answer this question in this and subsequent post(s). It’s not hard to find valuable, reliable content from valuable, experienced educators and peers…but its not simple either. Technorati is blocked by the district’s firewall…so we have to find other ways to search for blog content. The great thing - once you find a blog that is interesting and/or valuable as a resource for information, you can locate other blogs by “mining” the sidebar of the blogs you like and trust.

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B - L - O - G

Is “blog” the new four-letter word for school districts? I guess it could be. There is a lot of content out there in the blogosphere that is suspect at best and not appropriate for educational consumption at worse. But is it appropriate to just as a rule, block EVERYTHING that even smells of a blog?

As an educator and Educational Technologist, I have to be honest that there are more than a few times a day I have to count to ten because of how frustrated I get. So many sites I need and want to glean a bit insight and information from is blocked by the district’s firewall because it is a blog. I am not purposely looking for obscene or inappropriate content, so that’s not the reason for it being blocked. I am usually looking for other people’s views on technology, educational technology, technology integration, Web 2.0 in schools….you get the picture.

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