Thing 3 - Using Blogs to Support Teaching & Learning

As you've seen, blogs are easy to create and maintain and can often be created for free using one of a number of blog services. They also encourage interaction through the use of comments and most blog services allow users to upload media (images, audio, videos, etc.). For these reasons, blogs are great classroom tools. Educators use blogs as student writing spaces, classroom organizers, collaboration spaces, professional reflection spaces, and for many more purposes.

Take a few minutes to have a look at these education-related blogs. Some of them are intended to be used with students, others are not. Remember that people express themselves in different ways, and you may not enjoy everyone's writing style or the content of their blogs. These are merely examples of how educators are blogging.

James Logan Courier - high school student journalism
Ms. Mercer's Class Website - 5th grade class (outdated)
Teaching Learners with Mutiple Special Needs - resources
librarian.net - putting the rarin back in librarian...
Bud the Teacher - about teaching
Hobo Teacher - comical, about teaching
G-Town Talks - from an assistant principal
List of blogs related to education in various categories

Then, give some thought to how you might use a blog in your classroom or work environment. Read this good post for some ideas.
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To complete Thing 3 you must:
A. Post a comment to another blog of your choice
B. Look at your blog settings
C. Reflect on Thing 3 on your blog

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A. Post a Comment to another blog of your choice
Comments are important in the blogosphere. They make blogs interactive, provide feedback to the blogger, extend ideas, allow the blogger to get to know his/her audience, and connect bloggers who write about similar topics.

Recall that you have already left a comment to this blog while working through Thing 1. Go back up to the list of education blogs (edublogs) listed above and post to at least one of them. Or better yet, visit blogs of other participants in this project (listed in the right column) and post a comment on one of them. Depending on the blog service used and settings applied, posting comments may require information like your name or email address, or they may allow anonymous comments. Some may require you to type a visual key into a field to assure that you are a person rather than a spam-bot. Many educational blogs are set so that comments must be moderated and approved by the blog owner(s) before they are published online for all to read. Some might have the comments setting turned off and not allow you to leave any at all.

B. Your Blog Settings
Login to your blog dashboard and have a look at the settings, including how to turn comments on/off (but do not turn your comments off, as we will leave comments on your blog!) Watch the video for a brief overview of blog settings.



C. Reflect - Blog Prompts for Thing 3 - Respond in your own blog
How might a blog support the work you do? How might you use a blog with students? How might they respond to a blog assignment? What concerns do you have about educational blogging?