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One tree yields about 9,000 sheets of paper. The best way to cut back on our paper use is to go digital. No other online writing tool diminishes our paper-dependency like the web-log or blog.
Join the blogosphere and save a tree.
This presentation will help you set up your own blog for pedagogical and/or professional purposes while saving a few trees in the process. We also will discuss such topics as networking, security and interactivity. Come learn all the benefits (ecological or otherwise) of the blog.
Feel free to check out the resources within the posts and listed along the left of this blog. A SlideShare version of my PowerPoint presentation is below.
As with most new approaches to teaching, there are a thousand reasons for not adopting them in the classroom. Blogging is no different. Whether it's a safety concern or and issue with time, teachers can find lots of reasons not to blog in their classroom.
I'd like to answer some of those concerns and to your reluctance.
Is blogging safe? How do I protect students from online predators?
Blogging, like almost any Web 2.0 tool does open you and your students to a whole world of influence, good and bad. But also like many 2.0 tools, blogging services offer a certain amount of personalized protections. Embedded within many blogs is the ability to limit who may post, comment about, or even view a blog. You can set up individual accounts so that students may post. You may want to create a special log-in so that parents can check daily happenings on the classroom blog. There are many options that blogging services provide that can help you protect your students from online predators.
Who has time for a blog? It's a lot of work.
Yes, blogging is time-consuming and takes a lot of work, but can't the same be said for almost anything worth doing? In essence, blogging is an interactive form of writing. We ask students to write all the time. We struggle to get them to write anything outside of (and sometimes within) a communication arts classroom. This is a great vehicle for student work to be published and commented on by their peers.
Our Internet service is spotty. How can I depend on a blog as a classroom tool?
This is a problem with any online tool, but a blog's unique nature allows for some back up. The easiest solution is to have students type their posts on word processing software to either copy & paste later or share in a network folder. Also, since it is an online tool, blogs can be accessed anywhere there's a computer and Internet access. Your more technologically advanced students can post from their phones.
The server at our school blocks blogs. If we can't access them, what good are they to us?
If you really want to blog and you can find a solid academic argument for allowing blogs, you should be able to talk your tech supervisor and/or administrator into lifting such a block. Use some of the teaching ideas we come up with in the session as examples of classroom application.
What if nobody reads my blog? What if they don't like it?
There are ways to get folks to read and participate on your blog. As the teacher, you can simply assign students to read, comment, and post on a classroom blog. Emailing the class blog's URL is an easy way to get parents and community members to read your blog.
However, if you want your peers to read your blog and to comment, you have to do several things. One way to promote your blog is to be a regular commenter on your favorite blogs. Of course, you should be sure to leave a link to your blog. Another good thing to get in the practice of doing is to link back to blog posts that inspire you or provide you some background for your own posts. While these practices are important to promoting your blog, the best thing you can do is to post every day. There isn't anything that turns off a potential reader more than a blog that hasn't been updated in months.
There will always be excuses not to blog, but hopefully my arguments above will help convince you otherwise.
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