Looking for a Widget

Does anyone know of a widget that will allow me to aggregate the latest posts from my class blogosphere or classroom network and post them in the sidebar of a blog?

For example, I would like to be able to aggregate all of the content produced in my classroom and post this widget on my blog (or on student's blogs) allowing new visitors to see the latest things that have been posted in my classroom no matter which student blog they may have come from. I know Blogmeister does this very well and I would like to be able to do the same thing on edublogs.

Anyone? Anyone?

Tags: DavidWarlick, blogmeister, edublogs, widgets, aggregator

Comments

[wmchamberlain]

I haven't found anything like this either and I would love to be able to do the same thing.

[wmchamberlain]

I think I found something that might work for you. It is called Readr. The URL is http://readr.com/. It is a social networking site (what else) that allows you to combine all the stuff you do online such as blogs, flickr, etc. Then you can get a widget to put on your blog that shows the stuff you have done lately.

I added some of the blogs I use with my students and it seems to work fine.

Hope this works for you,

Wm

[Clarence Fisher]

Thanks for checking into this! The power of the network at work. I plugged all of my student blogs into readr and generated a widget but could only get one of the two to work. The flash based widget that shows many more posts and that would be more functional will not (or at least I couldn't figure it out) on edublogs or other wordpress based blogs. This is too bad as the widget that I could get to work only displays the last 5 posts. But this is definitely better then nothing. +++ points for giving a solution. Thanks very much.

[John Larkin]

Good morning Clarence,
Perhaps this will work... You could subscribe to the blogs, etc., in Google Reader. Give all the feeds a suitable common tag within Google Reader, such as 'classfeeds' for example.
Within the Settings section of Google Reader you could then select the Tags tab, change the tag 'classfeeds' to 'public' and then add a 'clip' (widget) to your site. The popup window allows you to customise the look and feel of the widget. It allows you to show up to 10 items and to indicate the name of the source.
Hope this helps as well,
regards, John.

[Clarence Fisher]

John; I had wondered about using google reader as I thought there was a way to do it but being fairly new to this reader I wasn't sure how. Thanks for the great explanation and instructions on setting this up. I've inserted it on my edublogs based classroom blog and it works great.

[tgidinski]

Another way is to use Pageflakes, and set up a page of either webpages or RSS feeds. You have to look through the flakes (basically widgets) to find what you need, and it does take a little bit of doing, but you can get little boxes of information for every student.

[Gerry]

You could try using Suprglu (http://www.suprglu.com/) to combine the feeds - should work if they are all using the same blogging site. Then use grazr (http://www.grazr.com/) to make your widget.

[Jim Lerman]

A friend just sent me an email about snackr that aggregates rss feeds as a ticker on the side of your browser screen. http://www.snackr.net/. He heard about it from the ReadWriteWeb blog. I tried it for about 5 min and think it will do what you want (if I understand your post correctly). It will be easiest if you can get your students to post their blogs to one spot where you'll get 1 rss feed. Otherwise, you'll need to enter the feed url for each student into the snackr menu. Of course iGoogle, Netvides, and Pageflakes will accomplish pretty much the same thing, but without the ticker functionality.