Blogistics

I can’t even begin to explain how motivated I was by reading someone else’s post to my blog – and I use the term “my blog” very loosely because I want teachers to participate and make this their blog, too. Now, I wait for another post… What do I need to do to get teachers blogging with me about blogging with students? How about experimenting with some widgets?

I could hardly believe that this brand new blog about blogging for teachers who want to blog with students has already earned it’s first comment from the outside blog world. And I am thrilled that it is Sue Waters, of Edublogs Edublogger blog. Even my good friend and blogging mentor, Amy Boehman, was stunned by this opening comment. YIKES! Did I properly cite her in the posting she responded to? What did she use to track my post on her? Now I have to think of a good comment to post back to her blog, and come up with some good topic suggestions. Any ideas?

If you would like to begin lurking in the blog world, your time will be well spent with either of these blogs:

Janni Black – Instructor from ISTE Webinar Blogging for Beginners
web20intheclassroom.blogspot.com

Vicki Davis – Cool Cat Teacher Blog
coolcatteacher.blogspot.com

Use Google Reader to aggregate new information posted to the blogs you subscribe to.

The Journal recently published an article titled, Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students by Ruth Reynard, Ph.D. I think much of the article highlights best teaching practices. What do you think?

Edublogs offers great information for blogging educators through their blog, The Edublogger. How will you use a blog with students… whole class? individual blogs? Check out Tips On Blogging with Students.

Will your students need an email account to blog for your purposes? If yes, do you see this work-around as a possible solution?

Creating Student Accounts Using One Gmail Account

This site is produced by the Department of Education and Training with the Government of Western Australia. Nice resources are listed on this page under the title, Blogs in Education.

Check out authentic classroom blog examples on this site. Did you find a good one? Post a comment and share your thoughts.

If you are a Delicious user, you can access my blogging resources through my Delicious site. My username is heathermcc – add me to your network. The tag common to relevant blog resources is beg_blog.

Why blog? After participating in tonight’s ISTE Webinar titled Blogging for Beginners, I was inspired by the teachers who attended. All very curious how to implement blogging with students, I wanted to gather resources for them. First, I began crafting an email and simply copied and pasted URLs of several useful websites. One resource, a link to archived resources from the webinar, was not immediately available. So I saved the email to be sent at a later time. On my way home, it dawned on me to create a new tag for these resources – beg_blog – on my Delicious account. There is no reason to wait on one resource when it can be added to the list, along with other new resources, as they are found and deemed valuable. Taking it one step further, why not post the materials to a blog, invite these curious teachers to join up and chime in, and begin blogging about blogging in the classroom with students… all while learning how to use this tool and witnessing its power with the reading and writing connection.