Instructional Uses of Weblogs

Informational Resources These personal spaces are are becoming more and more popular as well as extremly helpful as more and more tech-savvy educational and technological experts are creating their own unique weblogs.  You no longer have to wait for monthly or quarterly magazines to stay abreast of the most current trends in education, technology and business.  These passionate webloggers and blogvangelists update daily.  Through the use of RSS and aggregators like Bloglines you are able to more easily browse topics that interest you without having to navigate to each and every weblog under the sun.  Examples: *Weblogg-ed, *EduBlog Insights, *Bee-Coming a Webhead, Education Technology -Tim Lauer, Alan November Weblog, Ian Jukes' "The Committed Sardine", *Parent Leader Blog, *Betsy Rogers Weblog (National Teacher of Year 2003)

Course, Classroom, or School Management Systems Weblogs can contain course content such as syllabi, assignments, links to articles for reading and updates. Teachers in the elementary setting are using them to share: daily outcomes, upcoming units, activities or links for parents to use at home, homework, spelling words, handouts, permission forms, reminders, and more easily facilitated communication between home and school.  They can also enable teachers to post and update materials with more ease, efficiency, and flexibility. School Administrators are using them to better communicate with parents, community, faculty members, and other administrators.  Course Examples: Seton Hall Weblog, Journalism 1 at HCRHS, Slip of the Tongue, *American Studies, CommWebDaily     Classroom Examples: Happy Headlines, Carmack's Critters, Mrs. Huecker's Classroom School Examples: Lewis Elementary School, From the Desk of Dr. Tyson, Delano High School, Bryant Elementary School, Butlerville Elementary, Conners Emerson School

*American Studies Weblog is being used to get students and parents talking about the process of the course not just the content.

Student, Class, Teacher or Art Portfolio's Many weblog tools automatically archive older materials as new content is posted. This is a useful feature, as it allows a student to sift through a semester's worth of materials (or more) and draw connections between materials posted at different times during the development process. An application of this could be student learning journals with a multimedia twist. Student Portfolio Examples:       Teacher Portfolio Examples: Art Teacher Art Examples: Mustang Art,

Collaborations or Collections Blogs are also being used to connect people and groups over geographical space and time.  Some examples of possible collaboration configurations are: student-student, class-class, class-expert, student-teacher, teacher-mentor, or teacher-teacher.  Collaboration can also take place within a school, within a grade level or across grade levels. Weblogs are also being used to showcase and collect exemplary samples of student writing, creativity, and ideas. Collaboration Examples: Mrs. Britton's Blog, NJ-Georgia Connection, Collection Examples:M&M On-line Magazine,Mustang Times, Chris Burnett's Class Blog, NewsQuest, Mrs. Greenwald's First Grade Blog, A Look at Bullying, pingWillauerKayaks,

Electronic Filing Cabinets Instead of sending one-shot emails with links to great articles and resources that will eventually get erased by accident or alleged accident.  Create an informational page storing the links to the articles and resources so faculty members can browse, discuss and possibly post additional information, or resources.  With multimedia friendly weblogs you could even upload and store; documents, PowerPoints, audio / video, and much more.  You have an up-to-date educational resource site for your school or county. Examples: Learning Spanish, TEK Committee Weblog, HCRHS Tech Committee, Got Math?,

Professional Learning Community Blogs A way to bring professionals together outside of the school day.  Educators can log on from school or home to read, discuss and learn more about topics of interest.  Such a model could be used to facilitate a study group from a school or group of schools.  Resources could be shared, readings discussed, questions asked and suggestions given all on the web.  This would ease administrators job of ensuring high-quality professional development because an electronic record would be available of the professional discussion and activity that has taken place during the study group or professional learning community.  Examples: Building a Community of Practice, Seton Hall Weblog, *Entry Year Teacher / Mentor Blog

Enhanced Reading Experience (with multimedia / hypertext)  The ease of inserting hypertext into weblog posts along with the multimedia friendly uploading of files, documents, and audio/video make weblogs a great way to motivate or extend the typical informational paragraph.  It allows teachers to more easily build background and create concrete understandings of the content through the assistance of pictures, diagrams, slide-shows, maps, time-lines, audio/video.  Examples: Project Rain Forest, Diary of Samuel Pepys, Postcards from Buster

Enhancing Literacy/Language Discussions Teachers are using weblogs to conduct on-line literature circles, article discussions, art reviews and feedback, and to extend or continue classroom discussions.  These discussions can happen accross various content examples (Alan November suggests in science they can be used to reflect on labs, social studies for current events, english for prewriting, or to discuss central themes of novels.)  They are even being used by math teachers to spark interest, extend student thinking, or have them reflect on math concepts or real-world math applications.  Examples: *The Write Weblog, *Secret Life of Bees, Pre Cal 40S (secondary math weblog), Awesome Readers and Writers, Idioms are Fun!, Thinking and Writing Wrinkles,

For even more ideas for using weblogs in education please visit Weblog Pioneer, Blogvangelist, and my inspiration, Anne Davis and her website from NECC 2004 that contains numerous suggestions for using weblogs in education.