Blogging in the Classroom

Photo Credit: Kristina B from Flickr License Creative Commons

To Blog or Not To Blog . . . That is MY Question

@joe_edtech

NBC's The Office taught me years ago that blogging is dead. Well, since I'm doing that right now and I am incredibly hip (and isn't anyone who uses the term hip?), I know that can't be true. I read some great blogs daily, like Jeff Dunn's Edudemic and Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers, but that is really what I do for my own professional reading.

The real question I have is about the classroom. Is blogging dead in the classroom? I know a few teachers who are actively using Blogger with their classes. The one who has been using it the longest teaches journalism and decided three years ago that if she really intended to teach authentic journalism to her students, she better be teaching them about writing online. I recently worked with a student teacher in Freshman English who started having her students write and respond to posts online. The reason, because it is gives them a place to practice formal writing collaboratively with their peers - it's yet another way to model good digital citizenship. She found that the writing the students produced was consistently better when they knew it is going to be published and visible by her entire classroom community.

I did help a teacher set up a private blog for her special education class the other day and her response was, "Jeez, I thought this would take all afternoon. This is so easy." I think so too - so why aren't more people using it?

My hope is that this post will be interactive. I'm going to ask several people to send this out to their teaching communities and I'd love to get responses to the questions:

1. If you are blogging with your classroom, how are you doing it and has it been successful?
2. If you are really opposed to blogging with your students, why?
3. And, if the reason you aren't blogging is because you don't like Blogger, have you considered other platforms, like WordPress?

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Please post comments and answers to the questions in the box below.