In which I’m in new web blist

Posted By Kevin Gaugler on February 26, 2009


I recently discovered a tool called blist, which allows anyone to create and embed spreadsheets into any website. Normally I find spreadsheets profoundly uninteresting, but call it a top ten list and it’s a good read, right?  In any event, blist really peaked my curiosity when I heard that the Obama-Biden transition team used blist for their Change.gov site. So I checked out blist and was taken by its ease-of-use and robust functionality. Currently there are only a few blist projects tagged as “educational” but I’m convinced that this new web tool has legs in the language classroom. For starters, I thought a community could us it as a highly structured wiki to make useful lists of information such as a directory of web-based tools for learning languages. I created this spreadsheet for gathering such information and I thought we could start to populate it. You can even take the form and embed it on your own site so that we can cast a wider, and therefore more intelligent, net. Go ahead, fill out the form with your favorite web tool and include all the data you can gather about it.

You can check out the results of everyone’s work by going directly to the grid. If you click on the “publish form” button in blist, it allows you to embed the user-friendly form into your site. Unfortunately, WordPress currently seems to reject embedding the grid itself into this post. If anyone has figured out how to get around this obstacle, let me know.

If you are intrigued now, here’s a five-minute demo of blist given by the company’s CEO. It’s geared to business folks but you’ll get the idea.

How do you think you could use blist in your profession, but particularly in the language classroom? I’d love to hear some ideas. I’ll start thinking of more of my own and find an interesting and new Web 2.0 way to share it.

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In which I’m in new web blist by Kevin Gaugler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Categories: Productivity, Teaching, Teaching and Learning, web 2.0
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About the author

Kevin Gaugler

Kevin Gaugler is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Technology has always been part of the DNA of his teaching. As a graduate student, Dr. Gaugler began working in The University of Connecticut's state-of-the-art multimedia language center to research relationships between the 5Cs and instructional technology. While at Marist, he has developed a a FIPSE-funded course entitled Spanish and Technology and has helped to create Identity Quest, a course that rethinks technology and study abroad. He has presented his pedagogical innovations at numerous conferences and colleges in the United States and is the author of several monographs.

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