The second iPad workflow is for teachers who use blogging platforms with their students. The best blog platform on the planet right now is WordPress – it has an excellent balance of beginning and advanced features, flexibility, power, ease of use, and portability (what you do in WordPress can be exported and taken with you). The other blog platform I recommend for blogging but not necessarily for website creation per se is Blogger (Google’s platform). Both are free. If you want a quick rundown of how to begin using WordPress as a class website, read this.

I’ll be posting quite a bit about WordPress on its own, but suffice to say, one of the major differences between WordPress and Blogger is the fact that you can run your own installation of WordPress, but Blogger is always run through Google’s servers. This may or may not matter to you, depending on what you want to accomplish. There are some other differences, but that discussion is for another place and time. Here and now, let’s consider how to manage a lot of blogs using your iPad and two apps: Blogsy and Reeder.

The Setup:

Each of your students has a blog where they post various things. You have a blog that you call your “class website” (you might have a different class website for different courses that you teach – for example, one for Algebra and one for Geometry, or whatever). I recommend having a single class website for each course, not for each section. If you try to manage four or five different sites you’ll go nuts.

The Workflow:

1. You post an assignment on the class website.
2. Students write their blog posts in response.
3. You read their blog posts.
4. You mark or assess their blog posts.
5. You comment on their blogs.
6. They reply to your comments.
7. Rinse and repeat.

Step 1: The Class Website

Different teachers have different preferences for establishing an online presence to manage courses. You could have a Moodle installation at your school, you could be using Google Sites, you could be using something as slick as Canvas. However you choose to do it, the basic functionality of your site should be the same. There needs to be a place students can monitor for new information – this is usually the blog page. And there should be some links to other key websites, including the blogs of each of the other students in the blogging network. This is the bare minimum for a solid online blogging course platform. I’ll show you how this is set up in WordPress, and then how to manage it with an iPad.

 

 

A note on iPads and WordPress

The WordPress official app isn’t very good. Well, ok, it does work for some things, but for an app running on the slickest and most beautiful touch screen operating system available, it’s pretty barebones. For example, you have to style text and create links using HTML tags. Most people don’t understand or don’t want to hassle with HTML – that is what graphical interfaces are for, to make the technical mumbo-jumbo fade into the background! (If you want to read a fascinating defense of hardcore techie command line stuff, take a look at the seminal paper by Neil Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line. It’s a very philosophical and at times humorous argument about why graphical user interfaces are bad. I’m not sure I agree, but it is fun reading.)

The other drawback is that the WordPress web interface doesn’t work seamlessly with Mobile Safari on the iPad. It works, but, for example, you can’t type in the Rich Text Editor portion of the “Add a Post” screen. On iOS you are limited to the HTML window.

Luckily, there is Blogsy ($2.99, iTunes). It’s a new app as of this writing, so expect its functions to improve and expand over time. The upshot is, Blogsy does all the normal blogging stuff – creates links, embeds pictures and videos, even browses the web in a little built-in browser – with graphical flair and drag-and-drop ease. This is the app you should use to add content to your website. It works very well out of the box with WordPress and Blogger.

 

Enabling XML-RPC Protocol:

This is a fancy way to say, you need to give your WordPress site the ability to publish blog posts that it receives from remote pieces of software. Head to your WordPress Admin under Settings. Select Writing. Down near the bottom of the page you’ll see an option for Remote Publishing. Check the box next to XML-RPC. Save Changes.

Set up Blogsy:

When you first fire up Blogsy you get a How To screen that explains most of the functions. To begin setting up the app, tap the gear icon in the bottom right. Tap Service Settings, then choose a blog platform, currently limited to WordPress or Blogger. I chose WordPress. I had the option of setting up an account from WordPress.com (which is hosted on the WordPress servers) or a self-hosted blog (which is what I have). Either one works. Enter your login credentials. Blogsy will establish a connection to your site, which will give you access to the posts and pages you’ve already published, as well as the ability to publish new material.

Tap Done to get back to the main screen. You’ll be presented with a blank slate in the middle, some text editing stuff at the top, and some icons to the right. The icons link to your accounts on Flickr, Youtube, and Picasa, as well as to Google Image search and a basic web browser.

Flickr, Youtube and Picasa: If you have one of these accounts and you’re often posting content from them to your class websites, enter your credentials back in the Setup panel (where you put your WordPress or Blogger password). This will allow you to simply drag pictures or videos from your account to the new post.

If you want to find a new image through Google Image Search, click the “g” icon and search for something. Pictures will appear – drag one of them to the blog post. Once you do this, you’ll be presented with a few options for how the picture should be placed in your blog post. You can place the image in the center of the post, align it left or right, or none. You can manually resize the image using the slider, or, if you scroll down in the options a bit, you can delete the image.

Once you’ve placed an image in your post, try swiping left or right to access the write panel again. You’ll see a mess of HTML where the image was. This is the end result of your drag and drop – a great way to avoid hassling with code!

The browser and the " href="http://wanderingacademic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/blogsy-link-icon.gif">link grabber is useful if you want to grab links to other sites and include them in your assignment or announcement. I do this often – if you want students to browse a Wikipedia article on a particular topic prior to a discussion, or if you found a great resource for students to review or explore some concept, you’ll want to share them from your website. Collecting useful links can be a good way to encourage advanced students to seek out enrichment, as well.

Simply select the text you want to link in your post. Actually, there is a manual option to link if you do this, but the link grabber is perfectly designed. Load the page in the browser, and drag the link. It will automatically make your selected text into a hyperlink to the site you loaded.

Blogsy also allows you to edit posts you have already published. Tap the Gear/Edit icon in the top left and tap Published in the resulting window. Blogsy will load the most recent 10 blog posts from your blog. Select one and you’ll be able to edit it and republish it.

The Rich Text editor is really just a way of making HTML tags fade into the background. Try selecting text within the preview or the writing panel and applying Bold, Italic or any of the other options. The appropriate HTML code is inserted (see comparison shots).

 

OK, so you have Blogsy setup and you’re ready to post some assignments or announcements.

Step 2: Students post their writing to their blogs.

If you need to teach students how to use WordPress or Blogger, there are some tutorials on the web, and I’ll be posting some geared specifically toward teachers and students – check back soon. To get you started, check out the following links.

Getting Started With WordPress – assumes you already have a WP blog installed, or a hosted site at wordpress.com.

How To In Blogger – lots of tutorials here.

Step 3: You read your students’ blog posts.

This step requires Google Reader to be efficient. You might have 50 or more students posting things on their blogs. Visiting 50 websites to read each response is a pain, even with a fast internet connection. You want to collect all that writing into a feed reader. RSS (“Real Simple Syndication”) is a great way to stay on top of your students’ blogs, but also a nice way to quickly read new content on other sites that you like to follow (I follow some tech blogs like Daring Fireball, TechCrunch, and LifeHacker. Some nice Education sites include NY Times Education section, Washington Post Education, CoolCat Teacher Blog, Free Tech for Teachers, and others. See my recommendations for more.)

Most websites have an RSS icon somewhere. It’s an orange broadcast icon. Clicking it will allow you to add it to a reader. One of the options is usually “Add to Google Reader”. If you don’t have a Google account, get one now. It’s free, you can use your existing email, and this is a crucial tool. I’ll cover how to integrate Google Calendars later in this series.

Each of your students’ blogs will have an RSS feed, whatever blog service they use. Add each one to your Google Reader account. Create a folder in Google reader for each course or section and organize the feeds in a useful way for you – perhaps, in the order in which they appear in your grade book. This takes a few minutes if you have lots of students, but you only need to do it once for the year. Being organized is well worth the effort.

My iPad RSS reader app of choice is Reeder ($4.99, iTunes). It integrates seamlessly with Google Reader and the interface is clean and functional. Upon first starting the app you will be prompted for your Google Account information. This allows Reeder to download all your RSS feeds.

If you have feeds organized into folders, Reeder reflects this with a stacked icon. Tap the stack to open all the feeds in a single panel. Or, you can use two fingers and literally pull the stack apart (place two fingers on the stack and widen your pinch, slowly or quickly). This will explode the stack to show you each feed within the folder. You can visit each student’s feed one after another. New or unread posts are indicated with a little number.

Step 4 and 5: Assessing Blogs and Providing Feedback

If you’re reading along and you want to comment on a post, simply tap the title of the post. This opens the post in a browser window from within Reeder. Scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and then hit the back arrow at the top left to return to the feed. This is a quick and efficient way of providing feedback on student work. Once you practice with the on-screen keyboard, the entire feedback process can be very fast and smooth. This is one example of a workflow that I think works better on the iPad than on a traditional computer. You don’t have to move from keyboard to mouse or trackpad and back – tap, tap, swipe down, tap, type, tap, tap, and you’re back. That’s almost poetic.

Step 6: Students reply to your comments, and the process continues.

There you have it! Now you can post new content to your class website and then quickly and easily monitor student responses. You can also start conversations and encourage your students to continue writing and thinking critically. All from the comfort of your iPad using WordPress or Blogger, Blogsy, Google Reader, and Reeder.

If you have a classroom full of iPads:

Get each student set up in this same way. If they have quick access to their peers’ blogs via Reeder, they are more likely to read and comment on other posts, thereby strengthening the learning community. If they have Blogsy, they can add not only text but images and videos with a nice drag and drop interface. This sounds silly, but people will enjoy the process of blogging and commenting more if the interfaces are beautiful. Both of these apps have that virtue.

Additional applications:

Set up a professional learning community with your colleagues. Each of you can blog about professional topics – and start discussions using Blogsy and Reeder. Simple and effective.