Will Richardson authored a wonderful book entitled, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, which I would highly recommend to any educator.  It is an easy read, not too technical, and explains some fabulous web tools in a “user-friendly” manner.  If you are wanting to start incorporating instructional technology into the teaching and learning that goes on in your classroom or school, this would be a great place to start your own self-directed professional development.

 In his book, Will gives a fantastic list of ways that you can incorporate blogs into educational settings – some of which you may not have considered.  Here is a list of some of his ideas to get you thinking about what you might like to start blogging about: 

You might like to create a reflective, journal-type blog to…

• reflect on your teaching experiences.

• Keep a log of teacher-training experiences.

• Write a description of a specific teaching unit.

• Describe what worked for you in the classroom or what didn’t work.

• Provide some teaching tips for other teachers.

• Write about something you learned from another teacher.

• Explain teaching insights you gain from what happens in your classes.

• Share ideas for teaching activities or language games to use in the classroom.

• Provide some how-to’s on using specific technology in the class, describing how you used this technology in your own class.

• Explore important teaching and learning issues.

You might like to start a class blog to…

• post class-related information such as calendars, events, homework assignments and other pertinent class information.

• Post assignments based on literature readings and have students respond on their own Weblogs, creating a kind of portfolio of their work.

• Communicate with parents if you are teaching elementary school students,

• post prompts for writing,

• provide examples of classwork, vocabulary activities, or grammar games.

• Provide online readings for your students to read and react to.

• Gather and organize Internet resources for a specific course, providing links to appropriate sites and annotating the links as to what is relevant about them.

• Post photos and comment on class activities.

• Invite student comments or postings on issues in order to give them a writing voice.

• Publish examples of good student writing done in class.

• Showcase student art, poetry, and creative stories.

• Create a dynamic teaching site, posting not only class-related information, but also activities, discussion topics, links to additional information about topics they are studying in class, and readings to inspire learning.

• Create a literature circle (where groups of students read and discuss the same book).

• Create an online book club.

• Make use of the commenting feature to have students publish messages on topics being used to develop language skills.

• Ask students to create their own individual course blogs, where they can post their own ideas, reactions, and written work.

• Post tasks to carry out project-based learning tasks with students

• build a class newsletter, using student-written articles and photos they take.

• Link your class with another class somewhere else in the world.

 Of course, this is just the beginning.  If you have any other ideas of how you might use blogs in schools, I’d love to hear about them.  Please respond to this post and share your ideas!

Many of the people reading this blog are probably here at my invitation. I truly appreciate you humoring me by clicking on the link to get here. Now that you’re here, I’m hoping that you will stay awhile (and come back often) to learn with me. I’m guessing that a few of you probably aren’t even really sure what the heck a blog is, despite the fact you’re here reading one. As a result, I thought that talking about blogs might be a really good place to start our virtual exploration of Web 2.0 tools.

 Wikipedia offers a pretty comprehensive definition of blogs, if you care to read it. If you’re like me, you might want to keep it a bit more simplistic. Basically it goes like this: The creator of the blog writes an entry or post to discuss their thoughts, feelings, etc. This post is published on the Internet using an easy-to-use, web-based program (often free of charge). Other people read the post. Sometimes people respond to the post by clicking on the “Comment” or “Reply” link at the bottom of the post. The author of the original post can respond to the replies. And so it continues… I really like the way Jeremiah Owyang describes the blogger as being the “keynote speaker” of the blog. It’s a simple definition that makes a lot of sense and might help you understand the differences between blogs and some of the other tools out there.

Probably one of the very best, easy-to-understand descriptions (and under three minutes long, nonetheless!) is the one put together by the CommonCraft Show. They truly do explain things “in plain English” for everyone to understand. Please click on the video link below to watch and learn. Come back soon for a discussion about how we might use blogs in our classrooms and libraries!