Uses for Blogging in the Classroom

Blogging as a tool in the classroom

Communication is one of the best tools that we have in education. If it is communicating to a colleague, administrator, student, or parents we as teachers have always been looking for better tools to do this with. Some of these tools are accessible via web 2.0 and are free. I can see this tool expressing the way parents and teachers stay in contact.

Here are some of the educational

The first site,

http://www.edutopia.org/best-blog-educators-2008

This is an article written by Edutopia Staff and challenges educators to begin blogging. It opens by saying many educators are not blogging. The article does not give any numeric results to how many readers are or are not blogging. However seems to suggest that many of the educators reading Edutopia are not blogging do to time and unrelated blogs. At the end of his blog he does offer a poll to test what the reader may think is the best blog. The author offers three choices Edublogs, David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth, and Cool Cat Teacher. After you take the poll the author enables the reader a chance to post your thoughts.

The second site,

http://www.edutopia.org/student-blogging-classroom-tips

This article by Elena Aguilar touches on the effectiveness of blogs. In her article her topic is one that all of us as educators feel from year to year; this is the first day of school “the jitters” I like to call them. She decided to reach out to other educators to see how they handle it. She was amazed by the responses and decided to write an article to help other educators reach out and blog. With in the article she offers suggestions on where to go and get started.

The third site,

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41/

This article discussed the education which blogs deliver. The authors Inocencio Maramba and Steve Wheeler discuss how this online journaling and tools of collaborating is growing fast because of its easy access and quickness to attain information and deliver it. Enabling collaborators in a Web 2.0 environment the ability share photos, linking topics in an organized fashion and the use of mobile 3G generation phones that allow instant updates and posts

The fourth site,

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=KJzJ881ZWdYc9vQ01ztHHT7NWsS5QhJT00LZvBlJZF85JLbnp42G!1178491195!1596248468?docId=5006872677

This is the Journal Technology Horizons In Education written by Richard E. Ferdig and Kaye D. Trammell. This research looked at blogs and blogging. They discussed how blogs are written, samples of media that can be posted, and how it is arranged in chronological order. Also suggestions are made that blogging may in fact be the bridge to the digital divide. When looking at educators, the article spoke of the following advantages: learning tool, teaching tool, research tool, and social interaction.

The fifth site

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=sR1Asxd0JcAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=blogs+for+educators&ots=P5FyEKs2kY&sig=DVc_n-yqdfHxAckAAsE3e-nN2SE

This book is written by Will Richardson, and focuses on collaborative tools for the classroom such as blogging. In this book he looks at the advantages to the tools on the web instead of the risks that society is afraid of. When looking at blogs, the author spoke how the tools of taking information from a one to one communication and expanding it to a vast network. This will expand the learning and enable the students to examine others perspectives of a topic. He mentions the difficulties in attaining blog sites for education because of the risk factors. His solution to this was educating the students the proper way to use the tool and what to do when encountering an inappropriate site or message.