Blogs in Plain English

by CommonCraft

RWP Blogs on Parade

If you would like to add your blog to the RWP Blogs on Parade, please email Tracy with the URL. We will link to your blog from the RWP website.

Workshop Agenda

• Introductions:
  Who We Are and What You Can Expect
  
• Private Reading:
  "The Educator's Guide to the Read/Write Web"
  
• Show and Tell:
  Blogs on Parade
  
• Private Writing:
  Blogs in Your Classroom: Boon or Bane?
  
• Whole-Group Discussion:
  Attractions, Apprehensions, and Applications
  
• Nuts and Bolts:
  Launching a Blogger Blog
  (Follow this link for a Word document describing the steps for creating a blog in Blogger.)
  

Notes from Our Discussion

Attractions	Apprehensions	Applications
Appeals to students	Time commitment	Create missing opportunities
Highly motivating: students will do this whether we ask them to or not	Another chore?!?	Priming the pump for class discussions
Students already blog	Learning curve	Accessing prior knowledge
Guiding towards appropriate use	Slow (or missing or fickle) Internet connections—access issues	Technological reading circle
Collaborative: created knowledge base	Access to labs in schools, access to Internet at home	RSS feeds for finding current data
Requests and elicits response	Teachers have to give up some control	Publishing for a wider audience
Fast and free communication with people far away	Trusting the computer	Links to other resources
Audience = absolutely authentic	Monitoring appropriateness	Portable resources
A way to share concerns with others—especially if they don’t get a chance to share concerns in class	“Differentness” in front of everybody	Interschool writing groups
Survey options	Legal issues	ePenPals
Saves paper	Decoding student lingo (the lol syndrome)	Parent volunteers
Both linear and non-linear	The loss of the pencil sound	Dissolve language barriers
Change shape	Our own lack of knowledge	Disseminating information to parents: homework, field trips, independent study
Links	Time commitment	Archiving, recording, documenting, tracking inquiry
Our responsibility to offer tech bridge to those who don’t have access elsewhere	When our students know more than we do
A different idea of literacy	Loss of FTF
Critical thinking skills: discernment, multi-tasking	The learning wall
Absolutely portable, always available (for the kids who don’t bring stuff home)	How to keep blogs private
Authenticates writing for an audience other than the teacher—for the world, really
Shares responsibility for teaching and learning
Giving a voice to the shy

A Practical Guide

Warlick, David F. (2006) Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

This book provides practical, step-by-step advice for teachers about using free web services to establish blogs, wikis and podcasts for classroom use. Warlick's Blog, Exactly 2 Cents Worth, http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/ has many links to help teachers explore reading/writing/multimedia publishing options available on the web. Among these is http://supportblogging.com/Educational+Blogging