Blogging

[davejackson]

I all, I'm new to the forum. I'm a 9th grade history teacher and I'd like to try out blogging with my students. I think it would be great for things like current events, extra credit, chapter discussions, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions? Can anyone suggest a web site or program?

Thanks,
Dave

[Unregistered]

Hi Dave,
I've been blogging with my students for quite awhile now and my students love it. I use a website called ClassPress (classpress.com). It's pretty easy to use and it keeps the discussions within the class. Blogs that my students and I create are not visible to the rest of the world, so I don't have to worry what my students are posting.

Susan

[CQPressOnline]

Hi Susan:):

As an avid blogger and teacher, I think you may benefit from a free trial of the CQ Researcher products. The reason I have chosen you is that too often we have found students cut and paste to blogs from sources that may be controversial, dishonest or extremely biased. I think allowing you free access to the objective and quality historical content in our databases and then using the content to provoke thoughtful class discussions, will prove useful to you and your students.

Please accept a free trial of CQ Researcher online. Please use this link: URL="http://library.cqpress.com/static.php?page=freetrial"]http://library.cqpress.com/static.php?page=freetrial[/URL]. Many libraries carry our suite of products, hopefully yours does as well. I cannot tell you the sheer number of librarians who boast of the benefits of this product to their students and tech-savvy classes like yours.

Enjoy!

Juliet Okafor
CQ Press Online

[Unregistered]

Hey there,

I am in my teacher prep right now and we use blogger.com which is part of google. All you need is gmail and it works great and is easy to use. As a future teacher they are teaching us all of this theory, can anyone tell me if in the classroom blogging actually works??

[groovy_wizard]

I am an Australian teacher and it is part of our curriculum to assess students and their ability to use and communicate through online forums, such as blogging. We specifically have to do it in our Science curriculum.

I have a blog set up on edublogs.com and all students in my 5 classes are signed up to this blog. This site allows me to closely monitor what students post and keeps the blog private apart from my students, which is good for their safety. When I first began blogging with my students, I used blogger.com, but I like the added security of edublogs. I have also heard good things about classpress, which an earlier poster mentioned.

I use it in a few different ways depending on what year level I am dealing with. In year 7 and 8, I focus on developing good communication techniques and protocols for using blogs. So I generally post about scientific issues that we are discussing in class or that have been in the media. I then ask students to participate in a discussion by leaving their point of view in a comment. I would normally put a new post up weekly and it is part of their weekly homework to leave a comment.

In years 9 and 10, I focus on strategies for constructing their own blogs, so looking at appropriate language and layout etc. I do this by integrating this into a particular topic we are studying in class. For example, at the moment my year 9 science class is doing a consumer science topic. They are testing a range of commercial products to find the best brand for its purpose. They are using a blog as a means of communicating the progress of their testing, as if they were an online consumer magazine reporting to the public.

I also tend to use my blog as a way for students to ask questions about homework, class topics or assignments. Its excellent because it means their questions and subsequent answers can be viewed by all and they can also help each out as well.