Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

It appears that the feed problem with Google Reader might have been fixed (though I have no idea how it happened). I’ll hold my breath and hope that this issue won’t raise its ugly head again. Nevertheless, I’d still encourage people to make sure they are subscribed to the Feedburner feed.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this problem reoccurred.

(Alice Mercer was kind enough to send out a message via Twitter letting people know about the feed problems with this blog and directing them to a post I wrote earlier about how they could fix it – http://tinyurl.com/ferlazzo . I don’t use Twitter, so would appreciate it if other readers out there would be open to letting their “followers” know, too. Thanks!)

I’ve written a few times about some problems people have been having with receiving updated feeds from this blog via Google Reader and Bloglines. Feedburner is now fixed, so please re-subscribe using the newer Feedburner feed This issue only relates to people who have subscribed prior to January using those two RSS Readers (and that includes over 400 people) — anyone who has subscribed since then is already using the Feedburner feed and shouldn’t be having any problems.

So if you haven’t been getting new posts from this blog each day this week, you probably need to get the Feedburner feed.

Other RSS Readers don’t appear to be having any issues, so I think this only relates to “older” Google and Bloglines subscribers.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but the problem appears to be out of my control.

I’ll also probably be running this same post now and then so that people who just “drop by” get the word, too.

I wrote a post a couple of days ago describing problems that some readers of this blog who use Google Reader and Bloglines were having if they had subscribed prior to January. Unfortunately, the problem appears to have worsened, so I would strongly encourage you to re-subscribe using the newer Feedburner feed. This issue only relates to people who have subscribed prior to January — anyone who has subscribed since then is already using the Feedburner feed and shouldn’t be having any problems.

Other RSS Readers don’t appear to be having any issues, so I think this only relates to “older” Google and Bloglines subscribers.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but the problem appears to be out of my control.

Some subscribers who use Google Reader to get updates from this blog might have started to recently experience delays of a day or two in receiving posts. If you’ve noticed this problem, it’s because you have been subscribing to this blog since before January (thank you!), which is when, thanks to becoming an Edublogs Supporter (which I encourage everybody to do) I was able to have readers who subscribed after that date to use a feed from Feedburner. There haven’t been any problems with that feed.

Since there have been similar problems (in fact, much worse) with Bloglines, I’d encourage all Google Reader and Bloglines readers who subscribed to this blog before January to re-subscribe through the Feedburner feed by just clicking here, if you’re not already doing so. It couldn’t be more simple to do.

You can also subscribe to the Feedburner feed by clicking on the RSS Subscribe button on the upper right hand corner of this page. In fact, the Feedburner feed is the one you get now when subscribing to this blog using RSS in any way.

I assume these Google and Bloglines RSS Reader problems will resolve themselves eventually, but you never know — it could also get worse. I figure it’s “better to be safe than sorry!” You certainly don’t want to miss any posts!

David Deubelbeiss from EFL Classroom 2.0 has  created a page with information about the next ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival.

He’s got a fun contest planned, so check it out and send your submissions by July 31st.  We’ve already received some excellent contributions, but there’s always room for more.!

Any thoughtful blog posts related to English-language learning are welcome, including examples of student work.

Here are some good Blog Carnivals that are definitely worth a look:

Carnival of Education — 178th Edition

The First Music Education Carnival

66th History Carnival

Days In A Sentence

David Deubelbeiss from EFL Classroom 2.0 has  created a page with information about the next ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival.

He’s got a fun contest planned, so check it out and send your submissions by July 31st.  We’ve already received some excellent contributions!

Here are links to two new blog carnivals that showcase posts from throughout the education “blogosphere”:

177th Carnival of Education

Active Learning Blog Carnival

(Note: This is basically a reprint of a post from last week)

A number of readers who use Bloglines, and subscribe to different feeds from this blog, haven’t received updated posts from here for the past two weeks, or have only received them intermittently. However, Bloglines users who have subscribed over the past few months haven’t had the same problem.

The reason for this is a few months ago this blog switched to a Feedburner feed, which Bloglines picks-up without any problem. Off and on, though, it has problems picking-up the regular feeds (including the “atom” feed) from Edublogs (which is Bloglines’ fault, not Edublogs — all other RSS Readers update without any issues). These are the feeds that most “older” Bloglines subscribers use.

If you haven’t been receiving daily updates from this blog over the past couple of weeks, just start subscribing to this Feedburner feed and you shouldn’t have any further difficulties.

All of the nearly 200,000 Edublogs are having the same problem with Bloglines, so, if you subscribe to any others, you probably want to check-in “manually” to see if they have any updates. All Edublogs that are “Edublogs Supporters” now have a Feedburner feed.

I, and many others, have also dealt with the problem by switching to Google Reader for all our subscriptions. In fact, any other RSS Reader would probably be better.

Sue Waters at The Edublogger just wrote a post called Share Your Blogging Experience and Tips For Educators New To Blogging.

If you’ve used blogging with your students, or if you’re thinking of doing so, this would be a good post to read and share your experience in the comments section.

For some strange reason, blogs from Edublogs are blocked in China. I’ve been contacted by a few EFL teachers working in that country asking if there was some other way to receive post from this blog. There is!

They, and anyone else, can receive posts from this blog via email by completing this form, which should take seconds. This free Feedburner email subscription site is not blocked, and subscribers will then receive the complete posts each day in an email.

Feel free to pass this information onto EFL teachers you know in China or elsewhere that Edublogs is blocked.

Carla Arena, a very talented Brazilian EFL teacher, has put together a great PageFlakes page aggregating the recent blog posts from over twenty ESL/EFL teachers from around the world.

These teachers participate in Webheads In Action, an international group of ESL/EFL teachers experimenting with technology in teaching and learning.

Carla has also put together a screencast on ways to best use Pageflakes.

A few people have recently asked me why I write a blog. There are many reasons, including that it helps me keep my eyes out for new tools and ideas that I can use in my own classroom, and that I appreciate the connections it’s helped me (and my students) make with others around the world.  What I have learned through writing this blog has certainly made me a better teacher.

In addition, maintaining this blog doesn’t really take up that huge amount of extra time over what I spend keeping my website updated. The people connected to our school who use the website daily include the three hundred students and family members participating in our Family Literacy Project; the forty students in our after-school ESL Computer Lab; the sixty Special Education students who use it as their “textbook”; and the many students in our ESL classes and regular ninth grade English classes who, though they might not use it daily, certainly use it several times a month.

By writing this blog, the numbers of students who can benefit from these resources can be greatly expanded — at little cost to me.

i also hope that my emphasis on the importance of using technology to develop and deepen face-to-face relationships has had some influence on how some teachers have used these web tools with their students.

I posted earlier about Scott McLeod’s analysis of the top 50 P-12 Education blogs, with this blog coming in at number thirteen.

Scott’s list links to each of the fifty blog’s Technorati pages. I just discovered that the fine History Is Elementary blog reprinted the same list. The difference is that this list shows direct links to each blog, which makes it easier for readers to check them out. So, thanks to History Is Elementary, here are links to, based on Scott’s research,  the top 50  P-12 education blogs:

1. apophenia
2. Weblogg-ed
3. Joanne Jacobs
4. Stephen’s Web
5. Panda’s Thumb
6. 2¢ Worth
7. Cool Cat Teacher Blog
8. Moving at the Speed of Creativity
9. Ewan MacIntosh’s edu.blogs.com
10. Students 2.0
11. Dangerously Irrelevant
12. The Fischbowl
13. Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of the Day
14. Beyond School
15. EdTechTalk
16. The Thinking Stick
17. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub
18. CogDogBlog
19. Angela Maiers
20. Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech
21. Techlearning blog
22. elearnspace
23. dy/dan
24. Around the Corner
25. Practical Theory
26. Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy
27. Steve Hargadon
28. Half an Hour
29. k12 Online Conference
30. Mobile Technology in TAFE
31. blog of proximal development
32. HeyJude
33. Blue Skunk
34. The Education Wonks
35. Drape’s Takes
36. always learning
37. The Learning Circuits Blog
38. Remote Access
39. PBS Teachers . Learning.now
40. Eduwonkette
41. So You Want To Teach?
42. Eduwonk
43. Teach42
44. History Is Elementary
45. LeaderTalk
46. Infinite Thinking Machine
47. Creating Lifelong Learners
48. AssortedStuff
49. Connectivism Blog
50. think:lab
51. O’DonnellWeb
52. iterating toward openness
53. Teaching Generation Z
54. Generation YES Blog

Mathew Needleman has written a good post entitled Advice For New Bloggers. It shares ideas for how bloggers can build a wider audience.

If you have a blog, or are considering starting one, it’s defnitely worth a read. I added a couple of more suggestions in the comments section of his post, too.

Blog Carnivals are compilations of posts from blogs about a particular topic. Here are the latest ones I’ve been reading:

65th History Carnival

175th Carnival of Education

107th Tangled Bank Science Carnival

Days In A Sentence

David Deubelbeiss from EFL Classroom 2.0 has already created a page with information about the next ELL/ESL/EFL Blog Carnival.

He’s got a fun contest planned, so check it out and send your submissions by July 31st.  We’ve already received some excellent contributions!

(Note: This is basically a reprint of a post from last week)

Many, though not all, readers who use Bloglines to read this blog’s RSS feed haven’t received updated posts from here for the past ten days.  However, Bloglines users who have subscribed over the past few months haven’t had the same problem.

The reason for this is a few months ago this blog switched to a Feedburner feed, which Bloglines picks-up without any problem. Off and on, though, it has problems picking-up the regular feeds from Edublogs (which is Bloglines’ fault, not Edublogs — all other RSS Readers update without any issues). This is the feed that most “older” Bloglines subscribers use.

If you’re checking this blog “manually,” and you haven’t gotten updates over the past few days, just start subscribing to this Feedburner feed and you shouldn’t have any further difficulties.

All of the nearly 200,000 Edublogs are having the same problem with Bloglines, so, if you subscribe to any others, you probably want to check-in “manually” to see if they have any updates. All Edublogs that are “Edublogs Supporters” now have a Feedburner feed.

I, and many others, have also dealt with the problem by switching to Google Reader for all our subscriptions. In fact, any other RSS Reader would probably be better.

I just wanted to make sure that readers know that I periodically update many of my “The Best…” lists — even after they have already been posted.  Particularly for Web 2.0 applications, I will write an original post telling about a new tool that I think is worthy of being on a “The Best…” list, and then go back and add it to the appropriate list as a sort of an “addendum.”

I figure that I’ll probably then write a brand-new version of many of the lists a year-or-a-year-and-a-half after I originally post one. 

Of course, there are some obvious lists that I’ll be posting each December, too.

Many, though not all, readers who use Bloglines to read this blog’s RSS feed haven’t received updated posts from here for the past week. However, Bloglines users who have subscribed over the past few months haven’t had the same problem.

The reason for this is a few months ago this blog switched to a Feedburner feed, which Bloglines picks-up without any problem. Off and on, though, it has problems picking-up the regular feeds from Edublogs (which is Bloglines’ fault, not Edublogs — all other RSS Readers update without any issues). This is the feed that most “older” Bloglines subscribers use.

If you’re checking this blog “manually,” and you haven’t gotten updates over the past few days, just start subscribing to this Feedburner feed and you shouldn’t have any further difficulties.

All of the nearly 200,000 Edublogs are having the same problem with Bloglines, so, if you subscribe to any others, you probably want to check-in “manually” to see if they have any updates. All Edublogs that are “Edublogs Supporters” now have a Feedburner feed.

I, and many others, have also dealt with the problem by switching to Google Reader for all our subscriptions.  In fact, any other RSS Reader would probably be better.