Janien+Benaets

The Sausage Machine is a learning blog of two classes of a secondary school in Flanders: a group of 30 young adults (aged 15-18) and their teacher of Dutch and German. The learning blog (edublog) got started in connection with a SMS-poetry competition set up by a team of twelve students in January 2007. The young producers were succesfull and the competition’s didactics got published in a professional journal. On TSM you can find the sunny side of language and literature learning. In connecting and in sharing knowledge on the blog (also metacognition) we - students as well as their teacher - stimulate and reveal each other’s learning capacity, competency and creativity. Each result, each product is a touchstone on the way of a new way of learning: strongly motivating and challenging, surprisingly enjoyable. Our wiki HST Het Scriptorium for writing exercises and paper writing in Dutch started in 2007. The TSM-wiki project07 for reading and writing art opened in September 2007 as a library wiki. In the beginning of 2008 opened another library wiki: di-da-deutsch for Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache.
 * __Name__:** Janien Benaets
 * __Website__:** [|The Sausage Machine] 'learning blog'
 * __Educational Institution__:** Secondary school in Antwerp, Flanders, Belgium
 * __Teaching Environment__:** Secondary education: languages Dutch and German
 * __Web 2.0 Focus__:** Blogging
 * __Description__:**

Welcome to [|http://janien.wordpress.com]The Sausage Machine, our learning blog, and to the WP blogs of my students: [|http://ruttietje.bravejournal.com] (Rutger has beautiful YouTubes about reading matter and one on Einstein); [|http://huntersofdoom.wordpress.com] The Hunters of Doom Blog, [|http://lepofo.wordpress.com]"Leesportfolio, [|http://midnight4.wordpress.com]I Love ..., [|http://crazytooks.wordpress.com] The goofy adventures of the Crazy Tooks! Since November 2007: [|http://evelyn1990.wordpress.com] and [|http://christophe261.wordpress.com.]

'Passionate about WordPress': that's me. In January 2007 I opened with one of my students (secondary school, young adults, 15-18 years), **[|Sven Wassenaar]**, a free WordPress blog. I choose for the Hadley Wickham theme //Rubric//, "a flexible and clean two-column with a pen on top", as our 'learning blog' is a language and literature learning blog. I am delighted with **[|Wordpress]**! It's free, rapid, transparent and it offers a beautiful variety of applications that are very simple to use. Videos (embedding YouTube, Splashcast, Daily Motion, Google Video, Grouper, Odeo), audio, photos, slideshows, files, their uploading goes fast. Linking, editing, publishing, commenting, moderating, ... for an absolute beginner 2.0 like me it's an exciting WP experience. As for the dashboard or the sidebar with text and RSS widgets, the WP help services and much more ... spam protection, visitors' visiblity, feeds, ... it's all there ... and for free.
 * __Teaching and Learning__:**
 * __Preferred Applications__:**

The learning blog The Sausage Machine has three wikis on **Wikispaces**: one for writing exercises Het Scriptorium, one for reading and writing art project 07 (library) and a library wiki for Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache: di-da-deutsch. WELCOME!

[|YouTube], [|Animoto], [|SlideShare], [|Flickr], [|Classroom20] on [|Ning], [|del.icio.us], [|Twitter], [|LinkedIn], [|ClustrMaps], [|Technorati], [|De Blogoloog], [|Google], [|Wikipedia].
 * __Mentor(s) and Hero(es)__:**
 * __Favorite Web 2.0 Applications Right Now__:**