Why Should I Blog With My Students?
Posted by Janice on October 22, 2008 in Blogging, Podcasting, Web 2.0
Many teachers want to have a place where they can easily post materials for student use, showcase student projects and provide a forum for online discussion. Blogs provide this venue for teachers and students by offering a community forum for their use. Posts to the blog can be photographs, video, audio or word processed, making blogs a good place to post student and teacher multimedia projects which can be viewed from any computer, anywhere, anytime. This allows student, parent and teacher interaction from home, school, the library, and web enabled cell phones.
Here are some reasons to use a classroom blog:
1. Post materials and resources for students and parents
2. Host online discussions based on books your students are reading, discussion topics from your classroom, etc.
3. Create a class publication such as a monthly newsletter that can be read online.
4. Post student projects and writing for peer and teacher review.
5. Share your lesson plans and web links
6. Integrate multimedia of all kinds
7. Organize projects, events, information
8. Get feedback from fellow teachers, parents, students which builds a community around your classroom.
Blogging with your classes
The Seattle School District does not block EduBlogs. Go there and sign up for their free Blog. You can use this site for audio casts as well as video.
If you want to get email for your students that is not blocked by the district go to Gaggle.net
If you want your students to work from a different email at home, Edublogs recommends gmail from Google and their great help source, The Blogger, tells you how to do this.
Tutorials for Edublogs:
Quick Guide to get you started: edublogstutorial
A complete tutorial with updates from Edublogs support in pdf format: edublogging
Copyright and Safety:
When you or your students are blogging there are copyright issues and safety issues to consider. Here are some sites that will help you deal with both.
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
This law explains how a child’s privacy is protected online. Working with children and blogs, this is a must-read item.
Copyright and Fair Use.
This simple primer gives the basics on copyright and fair use laws as it pertains to the Internet. Any teacher posting on the Internet should take the time to read this.
A Teacher’s Guide to Fair Use and Copyright
Another helpful guide to fair use and copyright, this one is specifically designed for teachers. It also includes a chart for fair use to post in your classroom.
Discovery Blogging Rules
An extensive set of rules for classroom blogging which includes clearly defined consequences to breaking the rules. This list can serve as a model for the rules in your classroom.
Multimedia Resources for Blogging:
Remember: The multimedia resources can be used with other multimedia projects, too.
Sound and Photo Conversion Sites:
Pain.Net freeware that helps you manipulate images to post on the blog or use in other applications.
Zamzar: a free online file conversions site. It converts images, documents, videos and other files from one format to another in order to post to the Blog
Audacity: a free cross platform sound editor and recorder especially useful for the Dells.
Audacity tutorials:
Audacity Quick Guide to get you started audacity
Remember that you can use the Audacity software for storytelling, too.
Audacity Tutorial for Podcasters: This is comprehensive, but broken down into easy sections.
http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm
You will need to download the LAME MP3 encoder from Audacity to change sound files to MP3 for the web.
1. Under “For Audacity on Windows”, left click on the link “libmp3lame-win-3.97.zip” and save the zip folder to anywhere on your computer.
2. When you have finished downloading the ZIP folder, unzip it and save the file lame_enc.dll that it contains to anywhere on your computer.
Voice Thread
This is an amazing tool that allows you and your students to make a presentation, put it online and comment on it. You can comment on a document as well. This embeds well into an Edublogs site.
Take a look at, What is Voice Thread? on their site to get a feeling for what this tool does.
AcidXpress is a free download from Sony that allows you to make your own music on a Dell.
Note: Sony has other options that cost money for those who want to do more with this software.
The Levelator is a free cross platform program that allows you to adjust the sound of downloaded loops, and effects. (Nice for both Dells and Macs)
Online Resources for Royalty Free Music and Sound Effects:
Four Bees has free sounds, graphics and more.
StoneWashed.net has free sound effects and loops that are identified as .wav or .mp3.
Royalty Free Music provides sound loops for podcasts and audio casts.
For more music go to http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/free-music-resources.html
Partners in Rhyme is a great site for all sorts of multimedia projects that need music from different genres. They have loops and sound effects as well.
Let me know how Blogging is working for you and your students. I’d love to link to some of your great Blog sites when you are ready.
October 22nd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I recently recommended edublogs to teachers I work with as well. We have had some problems – slow processing of new account requests and periodic generalized slowness of the service. It has been widespread enough that I am thinking about changing my recommendation.
Have other people found the free version of edublogs to be so slow that they don’t want to use it?
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
Matt…We have experienced those slow downs, too. Over the last month Edublogs has been updated and they have done a lot of maintenance. I contacted a tech helper there and they expect it to be better since the changes. I hope so. At the same time that Edublogs was working on their system, SDS was having trouble with ours so that did not help.
Keep me posted on what you experience. Thanks for your input!
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Hi Janice,
Thank you for sharing your ideas. Here’s one maybe you would include…
Using the blog to have students write ongoing stories, where students could add chapters in a story, improve dialogue, action details, etc.
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:26 pm
It is very engaging to get the students involved with reading and writing. Wouldnt it be great to also get parents involved, and to share opportunities to get involved in the the middle school classroom. I think it should be project based. From a group starting to exploring the use of blogs.
October 24th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Carole and Explorers,
I am so glad that you are starting to think about blogging as a communication and writing tool. You had two great mentors at your initial session.
Carole, I have seen a a wiki used for the ongoing story idea. It looked like it was working well.
Opening the blog to parent comments is a good idea, as long as they understand perameters of useful comments. Am I being too cautious here? Using voice thread to post an project that could be commented on might be a great way to get started.
—Janice
October 27th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I did a bit of poking around and found several other people complaining about slowness and reliability problems with edublogs. I don’t want to flame them, but I do recommend folks investigate this issue before committing to this service.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Matt…In your poking around have you talked to anyone who uses the Campus version (You pay for this.)of Edublogs? There are supposed to be advantages to that and I would really like to hear from someone who has used it.
What blog service would you suggest?
October 29th, 2008 at 11:27 am
I am looking pretty hard at wordpress.com and weebly.com and google’s blogger.
I have not talked to anyone that uses the paid edublogs service, I expect it would offer better reliability, but don’t know.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I’d recommend http://classblogmeister.com
A steady, reliable, and safe option for hosting teacher and student blogs.
November 20th, 2008 at 8:52 am
I am the library assistant at Garfield, but I am also studying digital media at UW.
Much of our class time recently has been about how institutions can integrate Web 2.0 tech into their functions.
First, it’s great to see an IT blog. I didn’t know it existed until now.
Second, I noticed the comment discussion about reliable blog platforms. Instructors in my program encourage the use of wordpress.com and I have found it pretty user friendly as a beginner blogger.
Great to see teachers and staff discussing this stuff.
Ever thought about podcasts? (To anyone)
November 20th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Mark and Ian…
Thank you for your comments and suggestions. They will help teachers make decisions about the type of blog they would like to use.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I have found 21classes.com to be very reliable. Very easy to set up teache rblog and studetn blogs without kids needing emails! I had nothing but headaches with edublogs.