What's In The News?

Educational Blogging

Laurel A Clyde. Teacher Librarian. Seattle: Feb 2005. Vol. 32, Iss. 3; pg. 43, 3 pgs

Summary:

The article “Educational Blogging” looks at the uses of educational blogs. Not only are blogs used for students but blogs are also helpful for teachers and the community. Some blogs are written by subject experts who provide teachers with useful information to share with their colleagues and students. Blogs can also be used to post announcements that parents and other members of the community can have access to. The article states that blogging “has the potential to motivate students, to build online collaboration, and enhance learning opportunities”. Blogging can promote literacy through dialog and storytelling and can provide prompt feedback for students and teachers. With using blogs, students can write about topics important to them and share their ideas with their peers. The article gives some great sources of different educational blogs that can be helpful for teachers. One website is http://educational.blogs.com/ which has links to different blogs teachers have created and links to blogs where teachers can communicate with each other and share ideas about curriculum topics. Another site that the article talks about is http://weblogg-ed.com/. This site also has different blogs that can be useful to teachers and students and has a link to http://edublogs.org/ where you can sign up and create your own educational blog. This article talks about all the wondrous aspects of blogs and how they should be noticed more in the classroom. Blogs need to start being supported by school libraries just how other tools are supported, because a good blog can be just as useful as a book.

Response:

I really enjoyed reading this article. I think blogs are a great tool to use in the classroom and this article reinforces their importance. I also really liked all the good links the article provided. I checked out a bunch of them and they had some really good information on them. I really liked http://edublogs.org/ and I signed up to make my own blog. I like this blog better than Blogger because its main purpose is for educational blogs. I would recommend others checking it out.

Questions:

Would it be better to have one main blog for all the students to post on, or should every student have their own blogs?

Would it be best to read over blogs before students post them, or let them post and then look over them?

Are their some rules and regulations that teachers need to follow when using blogs in the classroom? Such as should students use fake names and are their certain topics that shouldn’t be discussed?