What Are Holidays For Anyway?

One of the really good things about holidays is that you can take your time about things and so it has been for the past couple of days as I have wandered around the wonderful feeds I subscribe to. Having been away for three weeks recently, there has been quite a bit of catching up to do. Because there has been a bit of catching up to do the following are a dot point listing of the really nice links that have come in via the RSS feeds and elsewhere.

• The online Connected magazine from Scotland always has some thought provoking articles and Issue No 17 is no exception. Check out the articles by Ewan McIntosh and Tessa Watson in particular
• Famster is a family focussed site for the development of online communities. In their press clippings they say Famster sites are..”Designed with the needs of today’s Internet savvy families in mind, Famster’s private online community puts parents in the driver’s seat. Famster enables families to enjoy the best of the Internet through features such as photo and video sharing, virtual scrapbooking and blogging in a safe, secure, fun and free environment without the worry of exposing personal information.”

Interesting, I am thinking that Famster may be a way in to get parents and families at school involved in Web 2.0 in a controlled way that enables a degree of individuality but within a restrictive environment. That should enable them to get a feel for this sort of environment without having to pay too much attention to issues of security, that can come later.

• If like me you have the microwave oven knowledge level when it comes to RSS, that is you know it works beautifully and you couldn’t do Web 2.0 without it but aside from subscribing to feeds you know little else then Mark Wagner has just uploaded a great entry to Infinite Thinking titled It Really Is Really Simple: RSS for Educators

• Whilst over at Cool Cat Teacher I was really taken with the cartoons that Vicki had added to her ever burgeoning array of talents. A quick backtrack and I was at ToonDoo a really neat comic-creating tool designed for students but hey why should they have all the fun?

Check out my first ToonDoo