Technology+911

Communicating With Blogs: Avoiding the Crisis Before It Occurs
It’s Sunday afternoon. You’re looking back over the past week as well as looking forward to the week to come. You want a way to communicate an ever-growing amount of information to a classroom full of students as well as their families. Last week’s make-up work, this week’s assignments, newsletters, pictures, study guides, project examples: how will you ever get that much information to that many people? Constantly changing addresses have rendered E-mail ineffective, and a website is too cumbersome and demanding.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool that is as powerful as a website but as easy as a word processor? Wouldn't it be even better if that tool fosters two-way communication? Relax--blogs have got you covered!

There's a second side of blogging, as well: Blogs can be used as a platform for a variety of student activities at any grade level. Blogs provide your students with a legitimate forum for publication; student work is no longer confined to a limited audience--the entire world is reading! In addition to publication, the interactive nature of blogs gives an equally valuable opportunity for feedback and collaboration.

This class will teach you the basics of blogs: registering, setting up, formatting, and using blogs with your class. In addition, we'll cover the Madison County BOE policy for using blogs as a teacher. The class will use the learnerblogs.org blogging services. The skills presented, however, transfer easily to a variety of blog providers.

Blogging Lesson Plan

 [|2008 North Alabama Technology Conference: Technology 911]