Wizards at Widgets!

Since this is round two of teaching my semester long "Web 2.0 Technologies" class, I've found myself making some changes in the curriculum and, whenever possible, "tweaking it" where necessary. This semester, my students are catching on to concepts so much quicker than my first semester students (might have something to do with my own comfort level and ability to see where we're going, too!). My students always seem to go through an initial phase of questioning themselves at every step, asking, "what do I do after I get to this page -- do I hit the "submit" button?" or "what do we do once we get here?" Now that we're into the semester a good seven weeks, they are really picking up speed. Noting this, and noting how much they were interested in inserting a map widget in their very first blog (we do two blogs - the first is structured to learn the "art of blogging"), I decided to teach this much earlier than I had the previous semester. I couldn't believe how quickly they caught on! And, of course, after they got that first widget inserted, off they go. There's no fear of HTML coding -- they're off and running! Probably most popular were the ultra simple and user-friendly Live Traffic Feeds and Live Traffic Map from Feedjit.com. I had some students use Clustrmaps, and most did well, but some failed to receive a confirmation email which left a few students a bit frustrated.

But I think the biggest surprise came two days later. One of my students, just seconds after the class let out, said, "Mrs. B - come see this!" She proceeded to show me a cluster full of dots on her visitor map and found that she had a good handful of ten or so visitors nationwide reading her review on Picnik.com. She was all grins! I'm particularly interested in what the student's maps will look like tomorrow after our four day weekend!

Part of me did not really expect much out of the visitor maps/live visitor feeds this early. I'd even told the students that it could take a month or so to start seeing visitors, relating my own blogging experiences. What a nice surprise to be proven wrong, and what a great experience for my first time blogging students!

Tomorrow we head into new territory -- how to find blogs that inspire us and compel us to engage and/or comment. It's that whole read/write connection that I'm subtly trying to expose the students to.