Blogging Resources for Teachers

There are many blogging resources for teachers on the Internet. In fact, since the web was developed as an essential tool that helps people communicate important information to one another, it could be argued that the web is nothing but a giant set of blogging resources for teachers.

However, the reality is that much of the web is designed, not so much to share information, as to sell it. It's also a reality that teachers today, more than ever before, have many demands on their time and resources. While it would be silly to completely ignore blogs in the classroom, as they have become a pivotal influence on our culture, the fact is that many parents and teachers alike feel that children need to be protected from many of the negative influences on the internet.

In order to be a useful resource, teachers need the find blogging tools with the following features:

• Ease of use – Teachers don't want to add more duties to their already-heavy workload, and they certainly don't want to have to learn a new programming language, or spend hours configuring a blog.
• Control of Access – A teacher should be able to easily control who reads the blog and who can post in it, as well as who can comment.
• Flexibility – Aside from being easy to use, a blog needs to be able to handle the functionality used throughout social networks today, such as pictures, videos, podcasts, and plug-ins for other services such as Flickr.

Some of the resources that fit those criteria are not necessarily particular to teachers, but can still be of use in the classroom.

WordPress started as an open-source blogging platform that could be installed on a server. For people who don't want to go to that trouble, however, it is possible to simply sign up at Wordpress.com and have an easy-to-update blog in minutes for free. One of the advantages of using WordPress in the classroom is that it is becoming something of a blogging standard. It also has great extensibility for other media formats. TypePad is a similar service, using the Moveable Type blogging platform.

Very similar to each other, Livejournal and Blogger are more socially-oriented services, designed to create communities around similar interests or geography in order to bring people together. While they are probably the easiest services to use in terms of interface, they also are not quite as secure or controllable as the more robust blogging platforms listed above.

A new trend is the ability to "microblog" using services such as Twitter and Pownce. Web 2.0 users are still figuring out the potentials of this medium, both for information, social networking, and advertising. Education is also still a vast undeveloped potential of this kind of blog. It is characterized by very easy methods of posting, and extreme limitats to the posts themselves. Twitter, for example, limits posts to 140 characters. This presents an interesting challenge in concise writing.

One problem many blogs have is that of "spam" comments that programs or scripts add to blogs – many of which contain links that are inappropriate for an educational site. It is also possible for child predators to glean a great deal of information from the things that students post online. Therefore, part of a blogging education should be teaching children how to preserve privacy, while at the same time establishing an authentic online presence.

Thinkquest is more than just a blogging platform – it is a platform for learning, where students create projects with their teachers, use online collaboration tools, and can browse and study other projects from other schools and student groups. Since this takes place in a very controlled and regulated environment, it is an excellent way to introduce students to proper netiquette and blogging techniques without worrying about inappropriate content or links.

First Monday is a site dedicated to peer-reviewed issues about technology in the classroom. Articles such as Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom, by David Huffaker, provide a very scholarly view of pedagogical methods to integrate blogs into the classroom experience.

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