1) Your students
- They are comfortable with the technology.
- They will be more motivated using it.
- Their quality of work may improve because they know their peers as well as their teachers will be reading their work.
- They will get practice in using 21st-century tools that they can incorporate into their future educational and work experiences.
2) You
- Can view, comment on, and grade student submissions from any computer or laptop.
- Save trees and free yourself from constantly lugging around student papers.
- Develop a web presence where students, colleagues, and parents can easily view the work and goings on of your classes.
- Show that your students that you know a thing or two about 21st-century tools and reources.
So where do you begin?
I've looked and worked with a couple of free blogging sites that would work well in the classroom setting. Feel free to take a look at the links below to get a feel for what a blog might accomplish in your classroom.
Blogger is the site I used to create the blog you're reading here. It has many features, yet is fairly easy to set up. Blogger has an affiliation with Google, so if you're already up and running with any of Google's applications, it will be a snap to get going. A simple way to start would be to post a blog entry and ask your students to respond to it in the comments area. This thread of responses could count as class participation or perhaps be a homework assignment. You will, of course, have copy of what the student has written as well as a date and time stamp to reference. You can review the posts before they get published and there are privacy options that can restrict who sees and posts to the blog.
View an example of classroom use of Blogger from Brooklyn, NY teacher Al Doyle:
http://www.thetowntempest.blogspot.com/
Edublogs is another place you could consider setting up a classroom blog. This is another free site geared towards use in the classroom. It appears to offer better privacy features than Blogger and there are ways to set up individual blogs for each of your students without them needing their own email addresses. I experimented with Edublogs and liked the way it worked. Public viewers, however, do see advertisements unless you pay a modest subscription fee (about $40 /year).
Here are a couple of examples from last year's Edublog award-winners:
http://missbakersbiologyclass.com/blog/
http://areallydifferentplace.org/
There are other blogging resources which I have not yet experimented with: Wordpress, ClassBlogmeister, 21Classes, Ning, etc. I would like to hear from anyone who has developed a successful classroom blog with these or any blogging sites and let me know your preference. I'd also like to work with any teacher at THS in putting together a blog for their class. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think...
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