After completing the assignments this week I realized that I am not an effective blogger. This is the first blog I have done and I thought I was doing ok since I haven't had too hard of a time coming up with things to write about. After reading Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom, I realized I am more of a journaler than a blogger. I mostly just write my thoughts and opinions on certain topics and don't add any extra referencing or links to expand upon the idea. I hope to get better at that as we go on.
This week I took a look at three different blog hosting locations. The ones I chose were ePals, Edmodo, and Edublogs. I don't have any experience with either of them and I was pleasantly surprised. I just started a blog this year with my 6th graders. So far we are just blogging about what is happening in 6th grade and in the school, but we hope to be blogging about our book club books after Christmas. The blog we are currently using is part of our school website and I am not very excited about the options it offers. After researching other blog hosting sites some of the other sites allow alot more options that I would like to use. For example, I like how in Edublogs you can have each student have their own blog that you monitor. I think my students would feel more ownership over the blog if they each had their own instead of all contributing to one. Some of my students don't contribute very much while others contribute a lot. If they each had their own they couldn't rely on the other students to do it for them.
Overall, I am excited about blogging, but I think I need to do some more research in order to become a better blogger. I wish I had a day to just devote to looking at and searching other people's blogs. I think that would help me become a more effective blogger.
I'm kind of in the same boat with giving teachers software where the kids can post online, but have no real ownership of their own blog site. It's not really effective.
ReplyDeleteI've been looking at edublogs as an option, but another free wordpress option that you might want to look at is kidblog.org. It's free, simple, and has some options that you would have to pay for if you go with edublogs.
I know I'm not an effective blogger. In my opinion its a fine balance between frequency and depth. I tend to lean towards the ponderous and it makes posting often somewhat daunting. I think the concept of having multiple students post to a single blog for the class is great, it keeps things active and easy to find. It's not unlike other blog "networks" that succeed by having multiple authors, huffpo, Lifehacker, etc...
ReplyDeleteI really like using Edublogs to host my classroom blog. It has great safety setting and was exclusively designed for educational use. However, that being said, I hadn't looked into kidblogs.com though. If you can get some of the features that I am paying for through Edublogs (video embedding, adding additional blogs and wikis, etc.) for free, then it sounds great!
ReplyDeleteI think blogging goes in swings....sometimes you have more to write about. The really good blogs are where the author is able to "turn it on" every post. Even though for our class we have posted dozens of entries I still struggle from time to time to write a meaningful post. I wonder if our students suffer from the same issue when it comes to blogging....I bet they do!
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