Learner Blogs
Time permitting, we’ll explore LearnerBlogs a website similar to Edublogs, but built for K-12 students specifically.
Here teachers can set create blogs for their students. Even if the students do not have their own email accounts, the teacher may create student blogs with the teacher’s own email address!
After creating student blog accounts, the teacher is able to establish a final, “admin blog” for the entire class and add the student accounts as authorized users. The teacher now has a classroom blog even though the students may not even have email addresses!
Blog Class Post
This is the SAUSD blog class brainstorming the question, “What is a blog?”
Juanita: “I think it’s like an open journal. You can use it to support your views, reference, and substantiate. It’s liking looking at old journals from the 1800s and saying ‘that’s so facinating!’”
Laura: “To me it’s like a forum. Except in forums you can’t really post pictures. Students can post class notes for students who miss class.”
Bob: “It’s like an electronic homeroom!”
Lisa: “Would a good use be to post an assignment and then have the students post their questions under comments?”
Catherine: “It’s good to make class notes available to all students, to make it more accessible to my special needs students.”
Andrea: “We do our morning announcements over the television, but if students or staff are absent, they have no idea what’s going on. You could have a student summarize the announcements.”
Word Press Instructions
We will be using amazing blogger, Kary Boan’s, “Word Press Instructions” today.
This comprehensive introduction to WordPress skillfully guides the beginning WordPress blogger through the creation and maintenance of a blog hosted by Edublogs.
What is a blog?
Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia defines weblogs or “blogs” as “a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles, most often in reverse chronological order.”
First, let’s look at a couple teacher blogs. Look on the right side of this blog, under Teacher Blogs and visit one of the classroom blogs.
Let’s review the articles I’ve brought today to continue this discussion…this will segue nicely to the creation of a “Blog Class Post.”
Welcome to the SAUSD “Intro to Blogging” Class!
Before we get started, we’ll take a quick tour of “Free Software,” also known as “Open Source” software. You will be using the “Free” Firefox browser in this class to access the Internet. WordPress, the blog authoring software we will use today, is also “Free Software.” Other “Free” apps can be found on the right in the Blogroll.
In this class you will create a blog specifically geared for your teaching. You will create a WordPress blog on Edublogs, a web site that provides free blogs to professionals in the field of education.
Edublogs not only provides educators with free blog hosting. Edublogs also provides plenty of space to host your supporting images and documents so there is no need to post them elsewhere! Edublogs is also very easy to use, but includes much functionality for the “intermediate” user.
We’ll start our class today with the next post What is a Blog? after reviewing a few articles about blogging.
