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BLOGGING

What is a Blog | Sample Blogs | Uses in Educational Settings | Getting Started | Resources | FAQ

For the purpose of this website, I will be focusing on one site that offers educational blogging. EDUBLOGS.ORG offers free blogs to teachers (edublogs) and students (learnerblogs). Edublogs is for educators and learners ONLY and there are no advertisements to deal with that can distract children. If you decide to blog with another site, please consider the advertisements and other content that will be displayed on your blog. There is a considerable amount of inappropriate content in the advertisements and the ads can lead children away from the educational objectives rather quickly.

 

**NOTE: Edublogs has moved to a user pay site with only basics being offered with free accounts. As a result, we looked for alternative blogging sites and have found www.21.classes.com to be a great online blogging site. Please watch for updated resources for this blogging site to be posted as they are developed.

Edublogs is based on the Wordpress blogging platform and once you get the idea of how blogging works you should be able to investigate other blogging sites and still be able to navigate your way around. If you have already started blogging with another blog site, edublogs does allow importing from other blog sites, but not all other blog sites allow export of content.

What is a Blog?

Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a USER GENERATED journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site. The entries (or Posts) are often displayed in chronological order.

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

You can also add "plugins" and "widgets" to your blog and those are usually available in the dashboard or control panel of your blog. Plugins might include little tools that make tasks simple - like adding a post to a social bookmarking post, a contact form, google maps, and so forth. These are added all the time so watch for an expanding list of options.

Blogs can also contain links to other sites, images, movies, podcasts, and so on. Sometimes you can embed the movies (i.e.. from teachertube.com) directly into your blog (meaning it shows up as part of your page and not a link to another page) other times you just provide links to other sites that contain the content (which is better in terms of your storage quota).

Sample Blogs - Have a Peek!

Here are some good examples of an education blogs. Just look at the integration of technology in this classroom!

Uses in Educational Settings

I am using Edublogs for the purpose of this online resource on blogging. If you visit their site, you can read a great summary of ways in which you can use your blog in educational settings. Please take a look! Please note that you can use it in other ways as well - use your imagination! Other suggestions might be to ...

Blogging – As an Educational Tool

Classroom uses of Weblogs (Blogging)

• Reflect on your teaching and learning experiences
• Write a description of a specific teaching unit
• Provide tips for parents to extend learning at home
• Post class-related information such as calendars, events, home work, and other important information
• Post assignments based on literature readings and have students respond in their own blogs, creating a portfolio of their work
• Post prompts for writing
• Post samples of class work
• Encourage students to post responses to your posts – maybe an online reading is suitable for your students to read and react to
• Post photos and comment on class activities
• Invite students to post comments to give them a writing voice
• Showcase student artwork, writing, poetry
• Create a dynamic teaching and learning site which contains discussions, pictures, ideas, activities, links to additional information
• Create online literature circles (groups of students read and discuss the same book)
• Build a class newsletter, using student written articles and photos they take
• Link your class with another class somewhere else in the world.
• Post results of surveys they have taken in class
• Have students create their own blogs to complete class writing assignments
• Create an ongoing portfolio sample of their work
• Pretend they are a character in a book you are reading and set up a blog as that character – reacting to the events in the story
• Students could respond to current events and daily news
• Discuss activities done in class and their opinion of them and the learning that took place

(List from “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” by Will Richardson)

Other suggestions from November Learning, Inc. include:

  • Using a blog as an online filing cabinet - students and teachers can upload and store assignments, links, plans and handouts. Audio files (Podcasts) can also be uploaded and downloaded from some blogs
  • Collaborative tools - Students can extend conversations outside the classroom, and collaborate with invited guests from around the world and from within the community.
  • Literature Circles and Book Clubs
  • Online Discussions
  • Professional Development
  • Writing tools

How do I get started? I'd like to give this technology a try. PLEASE NOTE: We are no longer recommending edublogs.org as they have moved to user-pay. Please check out www.21classes.com. This site combines many powerful tools into one portal/blog site. You can create student blogs without student email accounts. Please contact berthelotj@spsd.sk.ca for more information.

Librarian Session One Handout - download here.

  • Download and Print Edublog Tutorial (PDF) if you want something to look at while you go through the process: This 15 page PDF document covers the basics of blogging, the dashboard, changing themes, writing a post, adding categories, controlling comments and privacy settings.
  • Download and Print Edublogs Tutorial (PDF) as it has more detailed information and screen shots for the basics of blogging. This tutorial will take you through the basics of blogging.

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(c) 2007 Online Learning Centre, Saskatoon Public School. Please contact berthelotj@spsd.sk.ca for questions pertaining to this site.