Fun with Feeds, An Experiment
I’ve been blogging about clickers and classroom response systems since 2008. When I started, my main site (this one here) was a traditional HTML site, so I started my WordPress-powered blog in a subdirectory of this site, http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs. That’s worked great, but lately I’ve been wanting to blog about topics that aren’t strictly related to classroom response systems. Instead of running off-topic posts on the classroom response system blog, I thought I would run non-clickers posts here on the main site. I switched the main site over to a WordPress site about a year ago, but I haven’t used it as a blog until today.
Here’s my experiment: I’ve figured out how to import the posts from the clickers blog here on the main site, using a WordPress plugin called FeedWordPress. I’ll keep blogging about clickers and more general classroom response systems on the clickers blog. Here on the main site, I’ll blog about non-clickers topics whenever I like. Since all the posts from the clickers blog will be replicated here on the main blog, if you’d like to follow all of my blog posts (clickers-related and otherwise), you can do so here on the main blog. If you’re just interested in clickers, however, you can just follow the clickers blog.
One practical matter: If you want to comment on a post drawn from the clickers blog, you’ll have to click on the title of the post, which will send you over to the clickers blog where commenting is turned on. The clickers blog posts imported here don’t have commenting turned on, at least right now. You can identify them easily, however, since they’ll have “Syndicated from Teaching with Classroom Response Systems” at the top.
I hope this all makes at least some sense. It’s certainly an experiment. I’ll see how it plays out over the next few months.
Image: “Pipes” by Flickr user .:Axle:. / Creative Commons licensed
Update: I’ve figured out how to pull in posts from the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching blog with a particular tag (“db” in this case). This will let me tag posts I write for that blog to appear here, as well. These aggregation tools are useful!