Blogs of Many Flavors November 8, 2008
Posted by kjlee in Uncategorized.trackback
This week I am presenting a “Tech Talk” to the teachers at my building. The topic is blogging. This will be an introduction to what blogging is and how it might fit into classroom instruction, not a how-to. I have spent the last few days trying to find examples of good quality classroom and student blogs to share with them. I have found that this isn’t as easy as it seems. Most small classroom blogs don’t show up in general search results. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to find them. Or at least I haven’t discovered it. I have found some excellent examples by looking at other peoples Delicious bookmarks and by looking for blog links on other classroom blogs, but I feel like I am going about it the hard way.
Despite my difficulties in the search, I am excited by what I see going on when teachers blog. What I have found is that there are many flavors of blogs. In an attempt to organize my own mind here is a list of they types of blogs I have found.
1. Blogs written solely by a teacher to inform parents, students or others about what is going on in the classroom. This seems to be the most common class blog type that I have found.
2. Blogs written as a conversation. The teacher posts information/assignments and the students respond with comments.
3. Classroom blogs done by the teacher that have individual student blogs as part of them.
4. Blogs written to follow a particulary project. An example might be a blog about a particular ongoing project or a blog that is used only for the lenght of a novel to document student thoughts on each chapter.
5. Blogs that are written as a personal diary.
I wonder how many other flavor of classroom blogs I will find?
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
You are not finding many teachers sites because we tend to try and keep quiet to protect our students – to be found, you normally need to advertise with the search engines.
Hit some of the social networking sites for teachers (Classroom 2.0, Ning, etc.). You can also surf the forum sites and link from the posts asking for help back to the sites to examine for teacher sites – this way takes time.
Here are my site that may help you out; I have two sections for my sites – one for teachers with suggestions, instructions, etc. (cjgood.wordpress.com) and one for the students, parents, and anyone else (good.edublog.com).
Some other sites to check out would be…
The Edublogger is a great HOW-TO site – http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/
These others are great for examples in various ways.
britjunkie.edublogs.org
teresaevans.edublogs.org
blogwalker.edublogs.org
msjamison.edublogs.org
mrbakersblog.com
Hope this helps you out
Mrs. G