- Students need 21st Century skills as they become college and career ready and enter their post graduate world.
- Blogging incorporates reading, writing, and critical thinking skills for students.
What is blogging and how do you get started?
- Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.
- In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what's new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.
- A 60 Second Guide to Use of Blogging in Education
My classroom Blogs
- Nuss Book Blog
- Blogs I follow: This is a good place to start with grade level blogs. This link takes you to the 5th grade list, but above it is the different grade levels.
Click on the image below for information on math blogs
- Blog-Pals Enlist a teacher at another school who is willing to have students blog with your class. Identify an instructional unit or activity you'll be teaching at the same time such as a weather study or reading a specific book. Take turns posting activities that students from both classes respond to online. Encourage students to comment on posts from other students.
- Web Site LinksIn addition to the static and dynamic information you post on the blog, adding links to content areas or research Web sites can be helpful. Make a list of the sites you want substitutes to use and add them to the links area of your blog.
- Conduct an Online SurveyThe next time you need to survey parents, use a free online survey such as SurveyMonkey.com or Polls (zoho.com) to create the survey and link it to your blog. This encourages parents to visit the blog and allows you to collect, tabulate, and report survey results online.
- DiscussionsA class blog opens the opportunity for students to discuss topics outside of the classroom. With a blog, every person has an equal opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions. Students have time to be reactive to one another and reflective. Teachers can also bring together a group of knowledgeable individuals for a given unit of study for students to network and conference with on a blog.
- Create a Blog for Problem Solving Assess and monitor your upper elementary students' problem-solving skills using a special blog you create for this purpose. Post a weekly challenge, like a riddle or brainteaser, that requires your students to think creatively in order to find a solution. Ask students to post their solutions on the blog, then discuss the solutions with the whole class at the end of the week. Each week's post and comments will be saved in the blog archive for later reference. Expand this activity by inviting students to find and share challenges with the rest of the class. This special purpose blog can be linked to your general classroom blog for easy access.
- Classroom ManagementClass blogs can serve as a portal to foster a community of learners. As they are easy to create and update efficiently, they can be used to inform students of class requirements, post handouts, notices, and homework assignments, or act as a question and answer board.
Click on the picture below to read about Blogger in the classroom
Click on the picture below to access a step by step user's guide of how to use Blogger
