Why Have a Classroom Blog?Classroom teachers may choose to set up blogs as a means of communicating with parents and students. Teachers may choose to display student work (without a student's full name), share news, information about upcoming dates and announcements. In addition to this, blogs can be used to keep used to help extend learning. Some educators may use their blog to post videos for lessons or links to other websites to help reinforce what is being learned.
There are a variety of blogging platforms, that an individual may choose from. The major blogging sites include: Wordpress, Edublogs, Blogger and Edmodo. Whatever the choice, it's most important that teachers keep up-to-date with posting regularly to the blog, so that viewers will develop the routine of checking the blog for updates. The following are additional suggestions in how blogs may be use in the classroom have been adapted from, Differentiating Instruction with Technology in Middle School Classrooms by Smith and Throne, 2009.
To learn more about why teachers from around the world blog, be sure to read The Edublogger's survey results, "The State of Educational Blogging 2013". Steps to Set Up an Educators BlogSue Waters or The Edublogger, has fantastic easy to follow resources for setting up Educator Personal Blogs. She provides easy steps that teachers can follow with samples of educator blogs at each step.
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Blogging ConsiderationsSmith and Throne, 2009, also suggest a few considerations when teachers consider getting started with blogging. The following have been also been adapted from Differentiating Instruction with Technology in Middle School Classrooms.
Role Model Blogging With StudentsBy creating a classroom blog for communication with your school community, you will want to make sure that you model ethical behaviour. This includes, using Creative Commons images with your blog. This means just because something is on Google, doesn't make it free for you to use. To find images and give attribution information, be sure to check out the post, "The Educator's Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons" . You can find free photos from:
As indicated in the Edublogger's post above, you can add videos from Youtube and Vimeo as long as the embed coding is available. However, you may not use parts of other videos for remix or mashups, unless the video owner gives permission to do so. Video Adding Creative Commons Attribution information in Blog Posts |