Classroom Blogs: Examples

I'll start with a quote from a 5th grader.
"I think my writing has got way better then when I started. Even my readers have noticed.I hated writing so much, but now that I know how to wright better I am liking it."
The essence of blogging is engaging kids in critical reading and thinking and then asking them to clearly communicate their thoughts. I encourage you to browse the blogs created by these 5th grade students, who were guided by educator Anne Davis. The student blog entries are reflections on their learning about writing. This is an example of students thinking and writing about blogs; both how to use them and how to better communicate through writing.

Here are some more examples of classroom blogs:

• The Secret Life of Bees is an online reader's guide to the book, created by high school students, and guided by educator Will Richardson. This is a stellar example of a blog being used as a collaborative space.
• Blogical Minds is a forum for 5th grade students to write about what they learned in class. Another spectacular example, from Anne Davis, that illustrates how blogging can capture teacher and student reflection on the process of learning. Check out this web quest teaching elementary students how to blog: Blogging: It's Elementary!
• AP Calculus AB is brought to us by Mr. Kuropatwa and his AP Caluculus high school students (and parents!). They document their learning by explaining concepts to peers or reflecting on personal struggles with mastering concepts. This is peer-to-peer help at its best!
  
• Mrs. Cassidy's Classroom Blog gives parents curriculum updates and highlights her first and second graders' work.
• Mrs. Britton has introduced her class to the basics of writing a blog entry and commenting by having each student write a riddle describing a literary character.
  
• ResearchFun! is a blog I set up in support of a 3rd grade class doing a research question-of-the-week.
• These are just a few examples. Please send us yours!
  

School Library Blogs: Examples

One of the things that really drew me to this field is the fact that so many librarians are finding innovative ways of using new forms of technology to access and distribute information and as tools to aid the learning process. I think blogs illustrate this nicely. Sara and I were discussing the specific functions of blogs in the school library or media center, so I searched out some existing school library blogs to see how they’re currently being used. While many blogs serve more than one purpose, here is a list of some blog functions as I see it:

• Library Instruction/ Techniques
  The Mabry Media Center blog includes a series of techniques and instructional posts on topics such as research planning, accessing library resources from home, and internet searching tips just to name a few.
• Book Reviews: School Librarian Picks
  Olson Middle School – Media Specialist Mrs. Kochel provides a series of book reviews for students.
• School Library Web Site
  Ms. Voelker of Huntingtown High School Library Media Center uses her blog as the main web site, which links to electronic resources, guides to print resources, summer reading suggestions, an about the library page, new-book reviews, and a page for each teacher in the school.
• Student Contributions
  Hawley Library Media Center has an impressive array of contributors and book reviews allowing students to use their writing skills to share what they’ve learned and read with others.
• Creating a Community
  Similarly, the Northfield Mount Hermon school library has a blog with a “Bookmark of the Month” concept. These posts include contributions from teachers and students at the school - building a sense of community by involving the adults in the blog. Also the “Lounge Lizard Archives” highlights photos of students in the library along with quotes from those students. Whether they’re doing homework or just hanging out, you get the feeling the library is an often-visited and well-used place.
• Announcements/Latest Happenings
  The Neil Armstrong Elementary Library blog is a good example of a blog that posts announcements primarily about happenings in the library and school.
• Establishing an Online “Personality” or “Presence” for the Librarian
  The Uni High Library has a blog that’s fun and informative for even non-students to read and often covers topics broadly related to libraries, information technology, and books without focusing solely on the Uni High Library. The primary contributor is Frances Jacobson Harris, the librarian at Uni High.

This raises some questions for me:
Are some purposes better suited to a blog than others? For example, if the school library already has a website, is it easier just to update the school library website with announcements than to try to maintain a separate blog for that purpose? If the library website already has a listing or toolbar of resources available for use by students, does using a blog to write posts that highlight some of those resources add any value? Or are students less likely to read these posts preferring instead to read posts about book reviews or some other subject matter.

tags: school library blog

More Ideas for Blogging in the Classroom

Here are some ideas for how teachers can use a blog with students in the classroom. This particular list comes from First Class Blogs, an introduction to blogs for teachers, which is put out by TeachersFirst.

• Make a suggestion box for the class or a particular unit and invite students to contribute ideas
• Students take turns writing a "Week in Review" blog entry
• High school students doing lab research can collaborate by sharing their data and findings
• Hot topics on campus, such as the uniforms-or-not debate, can be discussed in a blog
• Critique a web site to practice evaluation criteria
• Write a newspaper sports story covering one of their own sports events
• Report on a vacation or holiday
• Role-play a point of view by having them write a blog entry from a different perspective, like a rock when your doing a geology unit or a person from a different time period.
• Find another class to blog with!
• Comment on Current Events by posting a story and asking for responses
• Report on a field trip
• Write a community tour with pictures

Share your ideas with us by posting a comment!

Safety First

Safety considerations are a must when children are publishing to the Internet. Here's a list of things to consider when creating a blog for classroom use.
The following is paraphrased from Will Richardson's "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms", which I highly recommend as a resource if you're just getting started with educational blogging. It's one-stop-shopping!

• The basics

Students should never publish personal information that might identify them to predators: phone number, instant message identifier, home address, e-mail address.

• What's in a name?

The level of security you choose as the administrator of the blog is up to you and the comfort level of your parents, school and community. Students need to feel they're represented as the owner of their published work. Ideally, a blog can be password-protected so that students can blog under their real name. How you set up your blog should be balanced with security concerns. If you don't password protect your blog so as to increase access, the highest level of anonymity can be achieved by assigning each student-blogger a number, or having each student choose an alias. It is also acceptable to have your students use first name only, which I recommend primary grades for primary grades. Middle and High schoolers can use their first names for sure, and you can consider using full names. When doing so, be sure to engage in an ongoing conversation about Internet safety while searching, reading and publishing.

• Blogging letter

Send home a letter to parents that states your plans blog use in your curriculum and clearly outlines how students will be using the blog and the security procedures you've put in place. Most importantly, introduce them to the blog by posting the same letter on your blog and giving them the web address. It's best if you show them, rather than tell them, and perhaps some of your enthusiasm will rub off! Here's a link to a wiki on blogging put out by Bud the Teacher, which provides several sample blogging letters for parents.

• Blogging agreement

For the middle and high school students it is a good idea to write up a 'blogging agreement' with your students. This document outlines blogging etiquette and your expectations for the class as you enter an online community. You can even write them as a class! For primary grades, I suggest you always have your students write down their blog entry on a piece of paper before going to the computer to type it in. Again, Bud comes to the rescue and has an entry on Blogging Rules his class developed.

Free Blog Hosts - the Gist of it!

There are so many free blog hosts that I couldn't possibly begin to review all of them. So here are three that are frequently used by educators.

Blogger

• run by a team at Google
  
• very popular and extremely user-friendly
• blog owner can delete posts
  
• each template has different features, so choose one that fits your needs
• .com domain, so some filters will block this site
  

EduBlogs

• brought to us by James Farmer and the Chalkface Project
• easy-to-use "categories" feature allows you to attach common 'tags' to posts thereby creating hierarchy within a site for easy navigation
• administrator can password protect each post from viewing
  
• in addition to the blog, you can create static pages
  
• free wiki powered by Wikispaces
• .org domain
  

The BlogMeister

• David Warlick and the Landmark Project supports this free tool.
  
• security feature: teacher registers a Classroom Blog and then "adds students" in order for themselves to post articles and comment on others work
• teacher can password-protect reading the site
  
• search by state to see the many of Washington state classroom blogs in BlogMeister!
• .com domain, so some filters will block this site
  

For more information about other weblog hosts and to consider the different fucntions you might want, the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC published this Blog Software Comparison Chart which is a handy summary table of eight different providers and levels of service.

Start Blogging

• This entry on the SupportBlogging! wiki lists different free blog hosts and because it's a wiki, you can add your own favorite to the list or edit a description to add to the discussion.

Educators Blogging about Technology

• Will Richardson
A seasoned educator, Mr. Richardson has recently published Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms and is the go-to guy when it comes to web logs and their application in education. He is also keen on exposing how our students are already using these tools to Teach kids (eachother) and Flatten the World.

• Anne Davis
After decades in the classroom, Ms. Davis now comes to us from Georgia State University. Many of her recent projects relate to blogs. See her students in action in the NewsQuest project and more!

• Heather
Heather is a high school English teacher who is intent on collaborating with Lianne, the school’s teacher librarian. Heather has posted a diary where she reflects on their journey towards collaboration (sections on Time, Trust, and Total Collaboration). I included this blog as inspiration for each of us; we have insight to share and can serve as resources for each other.

• Bud Hunt
A high school langguage arts teacher in Colorado, Mr. Hunt is also a teacher-consultant with the Colorado State University Writing Project. He has conducted several classes in which students created their own blogs.

• David Warlick
His blog "2 Cents Worth" is updated frequently and is postively overflowing with useful information about all kinds of education and technology ideas. Mr. Warlick is the father of Class Blogmeister, a free blog hosting service offered to educators.

Librarians Blogging about Technology

• The Shifted Librarian

Jenny Levine has been writing about technology and libraries for over a decade and is definitely the one to look to when it comes to blogs and their applications in librarianship. She recently co-led a pre-conference workshop with Michael Stephens titled Rev Up Your Online Services: Blogs, RSS, Wikis and other Dynamic and Low-cost Technologies at the 2006 Washington Library Association Conference.

• Blue Skunk Blog

Doug Johnson authors this blog focusing on technology and its application in the classroom. He's a humorous and thoughtful read, so tune in :)

• Information Wants to Be Free

Meredith Farkas is the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University. In 2006 she was named a “Mover & Shaker” by Library Journal. She discusses a variety of new technologies including the use of wikis, blogs, and social software in libraries.

• Joyce Valenza's NeverEnding Search

School librarian Joyce Valenza describes her blog as "a discussion of information fluency, searching, teaching, and learning in the 21st century."

• Informancy

Chris Harris, head of a school library system, has a background in elementary teaching and instructional technology and is working toward a MLS degree. It's not surprising that he sees lots of interesting overlap in all these areas!

Isolation - Be Gone!

Blogs: Ending isolation. (2006). Principal Leadership (Middle School Ed.), 7(1), 46-51.

• Educators in rural schools are sometimes impeded from taking part in professional development. Then, when they finally make it to a conference or workshop, they return home with a heightened awareness of professional isolation. This article reports on the experiences of the teachers who took part in the Education Development Center's (EDC) Supported Literacy Institutes in 2003. Not only did the participants go home inspired to increase literacy in their Middle schools, they were able to * maintain that motivation * by participating in a blogging community.

• By writing blog entries, the workshop participants were able to continue sharing with each other. Teachers could share how they implemented the literacy program by writinge blog entries describing a particular activity or lesson plan. Or sometimes a teacher would write a ‘call for help’ and because other teachers could respond via the comment function, the call was always answered. The blog served as a forum for sharing success as well as struggles. This online community proved blogs a successful way to support new instructional practices while overcoming time and distance.