blogs4learning

= = =**Blogs**=

Educational Uses:

 * 1) Journal writing - encouraging the reluctant student writer through self expression
 * 2) E-learning tool for discussion - instructor to student - student to instructor - critical thinking & debating skills
 * 3) Collaborative assignments - Peer support - provide feedback, reflective comments & completing group assignments
 * 4) Compiling resource lists & links
 * 5) Advertising school news and achievements. Publishing children's work e.g. children's stories complete with the child's artwork and the child reading the story.
 * 6) One of the most common uses of Blogs is for reflection and self-assessment. Teachers can discuss what has worked in their classrooms and often more interesting, what has not worked. Others can read the teachers blogs and get ideas or make comments. Teaching can often be a lonely profession and blogs offer a way to broaden ones community. For teachers interested in ESL, the list of blogs at [|About.com] can be very informative.
 * 7) Class or group co-operative learning such as a class "blog paper", instead of a newspaper or a new form of a school year book.
 * 8) Blogs could be used to sort and sift information for an inquiry project where students from different schools could be involved.
 * 9) Gifted and Talented programmes could be linked through a clustering system and use blogs for students to post their findings and have discussions.

**Tags and Blogs:**
One creative way to link students blogs and provide coherence is tagging. Students can use blogs to evaluate a course or an assignment. If, as in many webquests, the students are given different roles ( talent scout, historian, journalist, geographer, etc.) these roles can form tags to link blogs about different topics together. If for example, a student has been assigned the role of journalist and asked to discuss the reign of Tutatankhamen and tags it as journalist and the next blogger assigned the journalist role blogs about Julius Caesar, it is possible to create a series of connected blogs around the journalist role. This has the potential to encourage students assigned the same role to network and develop the ideas of others and improve their own work.

**Blogs as Portfolios:**
Many schools are experimenting with blogs as portfolios that will follow students throughout their career at college or school. The blog / portfolio represents a on-line presence for each student. It is a place where a digital representation of their best work can be saved and seen by interested parties. For high school students the blog can be a part of their application to university and university students can use it when they apply for employment. Students are reminded to keep their best work there. This helps the unorganized get organized.

**Problems with Blogs:**
1. Blogs are often described as ongoing, unstructured public reflection. These very characteristics present difficulties for their use in classrooms. 2. Blogs are reflective and personal. The action has already occurred, off screen as it were, and the writer is using the blog to explain his / her experience with that action. This is personal and post fact. Most blogs have comment areas because there is no other way for the reader to discuss things. 3. Blogs with overused comment sections come to look at a lot like forums. Look back at the ic712 forum. It kind of looks like 24 blogs under a series of topics. But forums often go off target, making them hard to follow and keeping up with a blog course would be very difficult, especially if every student in class had one. 4. If students are getting graded on their blog, then it is an assignment and the personal reflection can be lost because the writer is blogging for a grade and not self-reflection. 5. In short, teachers considering using blogs for collaborative assignments might be well advised to look into wikis or forums instead. 6. The standard of written language in the blogs needs to be taught, and the writing process needs to be followed to ensure the surface and deeper features of the writing is of an acceptable standard. 7. Students need to be taught how to give constructive feedback, rather than having a list of comments that have no real meaning to the author.

Check out this link - lots of //excellent// classroom ideas here!
http://classroomblogging.wikispaces.com/

http://blogsavvy.net/how-you-should-use-blogs-in-education =Create blogs for free - http://www.blogger.com/start= = = = = = = =Blogs in Education=

The use of blogs in instructional settings is limited only by your imagination. Options for instructors using blogs: Options for students using blogs in your courses include:
 * Content-related blog as professional practice
 * Networking and personal knowledge sharing
 * Instructional tips for students
 * Course announcements and readings
 * Annotated links
 * Knowledge management
 * Reflective or writing journals
 * Knowledge management
 * Assignment submission and review
 * Dialogue for groupwork
 * E-portfolios
 * Share course-related resources

Articles About Blogging

 * 1) [|Scholars Who Blog] from the [|Chronicle of Higher Education] (June, 2003)
 * 2) [|Weblogs in Education: Bringing the World to the Liberal Arts Classroom] from the Newsletter of the [|National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education] (Winter, 2003)
 * 3) [|Writing with Weblogs] from [|techLearning] (Feb, 2003)
 * 4) [|Weblogs In and Around the Classroom]
 * 5) [|Blogging communities' popularity draws students] from the [|Minnesota Daily] (March, 2003)
 * 6) [|Crooked Timber] - a blog entry about educational blogging

Example Blogs

 * 1) [|mamamusings.net] - and instructor's blog for sharing personal and professional commentary
 * 2) [|Applied Calculus] - using a blog as course communication tool
 * 3) [|College Composition] - a class blog with links to each student's blog
 * 4) [|Writing Class Blog] - for students to communicate and share ideas with other students
 * 5) [|Weblogg-ed] - a blog about educational blogging
 * 6) [|Gangstories] - **language warning**. This is the kind of emotion and writing we would hope to free students to express via this medium.
 * 7) [|Blogs at Harvard Law] - blogs for faculty and students
 * 8) [|The Information Literacy Land of Confusion] - a librarian's blog for sharing resources
 * 9) [|The Shifted Librarian]
 * 10) [|Ned Batchelder] - software engineering
 * 11) [|Jim Berkowitz's e-Journal] - marketing
 * 12) [|Outside the Beltway] - political science
 * 13) [|Neuroeconomics] - economic theory
 * 14) [|Mildly Malevolent] - history and politics
 * 15) [|Bloviator] - public health and policy
 * 16) [|Research Blogs] - an annotated list of weblogs of researchers and academics
 * 17) [|Professors Who Blog] - a list of blogs with general topic area
 * 18) [|Blogwise] - a list of blogs by category
 * 19) [|City Comforts] - mostly about architecture
 * 20) [|Eatonweb Portal] - another categorized list of blogs

Blog Writing Tools

 * 1) [|Blogger.com] - free, host on your server or theirs with advertisements
 * 2) [|Easyjournal] - free
 * 3) [|Tribe.net] - free
 * 4) [|Crimson Blog] - free, but might include pop ups
 * 5) [|weblogger.com] - not free
 * 6) [|Radio UserLand] - desktop software you buy - requires some server space for publishing
 * 7) [|TypePad] - not free
 * 8) [|Xanga] - free basic service
 * 9) [|SchoolBlogs] - not sure how long this has been or will be around, but it's free
 * 10) [|Silver Logic] - not sure how long this has been or will be around, but it's free

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