Post 2: Blogging in education

It seems to me that blogging is best used for information sharing.  I share great stuff with you and you share great stuff with me and we are all the better, smarter and more informed.  I go to the Internet a lot for lesson planning, always on the look out for great ideas for in class projects, good videos to show (I recently brought my class to the school library to show them YouTube videos of polar animals, they loved it!).  A teacher friend of mine just recently launched a teaching blog and honestly that was the first time I had given any thought to a classroom or educational blog.  Here is the link to her blog if you are interested http://snippetsbysarah.blogspot.com/


The grade level I want to teach is early elementary, so strictly speaking for this age group some possible activities through blogging could be:


- Blogging about book reviews, taking a pen and paper task and create an online discussion amongst students.
- Create photo slide shows demonstrating their learned knowledge in an earth science activity; for example students could take pictures of plants on the campus as part of a living/nonliving earth science unit, then publish their photo's to their blog labeling and blogging about each item in the photo.
- Students could blog about the weather in their present environment and compare it with another environment on weekly or daily basis.  Each student could have the same or a different geographic area to compare.




As a resource blogging would be useful for:


- Sharing with parents what their children are learning about in the classroom though subject by subject description and photo sharing.


- Provide parents with specific online resources to encourage or help their students at home by providing links to educational sites.


- Enable other teachers to share ideas with each other.


- Share homework assignment with students and parents.