The World Wide Chalkboard

Blogs aren’t new, but they can be mysterious or terrifying to some non-techno-geek teachers. Let me assure you that blogs can be very easy to use. Most of your students probably have a “MySpace” site already. If you can type and save on a computer, if you use e-mail, you can probably blog. And there are free sites for blogging (for instance, edublogs.org provides free space for teachers).

But why blog? Because it’s a way to use techonology for teaching some pretty cool concepts about writing and editing, or for communicating with parents and students. It is far easier to set up and maintain than a web site, and accessible from any computer with internet access. And the real powerof a blog is the ability to receive and respond to comments about a particular posting. Permit me to suggest some ways you might use a blog:

Publishing:Post student work on the blog, and let other students and classroom teachers make comments for praise or suggestions for editing (you can moderate the comment section so that they don’t appear unless you approve them).

Travelogues:Recently a teacher at Robertson visited Japan, and kept a running blog (diary) of her trip. Her students read her blog daily and sent messages to her via the blog.

Parent Communication:Announce an upcoming project, with the message that parent assistance might be needed. Parents can volunteer right on the blog, or ask questions or make suggestions. No need to e-mail.

Class project:Set up a correspondence with a class in another part of the world. Work on your students’ letter writing skills (a sadly neglected art). Easy access and no need for e-mail accounts to send comments.

Here are some sites to look at for more ideas:

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/teaching_with_blogs/teaching_with_blogs.cfm

http://adavis.pbwiki.com/

http://www.teachersfirst.com/content/blog/blogbasics.cfm

http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/47

I will be introducing this to my teachers later (after testing).

Filed under: Teachers and Blogs and