I have a teacher blog, now what do I do?

The post below is copied from the one I posted to our school intranet to try and give our teachers some ideas for their new blogs.

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I wanted my first post on this particular Blog to be as helpful as possible to all the teachers who have suddenly found themselves with an online workspace, but who don’t really know where to start.

There are a lot of really amazing teachers around the world using Blogs in really innovative ways in their classrooms and sharing their experiences. In a way this is a really neat virtual way to step into someone else’s classroom and see how they are managing all the different challenges that come with classroom teaching.

So, here they are, hopefully you will find one that makes you think ‘Hey that’s what I would like to do!’.

Teacher Teaching Blogs: For these blogs I have tried to find blogs where the teacher is either using the Blog as a communication tool, or as a platform for the students to write and express themselves.

Class Blogmeister – this is a blogging platform that allows teachers the same level of security we have with our WordPress Intranet. Click on recent posts for links to different teacher blogs.

Room 208 – this is an older blog by a teacher called Bob Sprankle. He has his elementary age student post podcasts to the blog.

Smith’s Class Blog – this is a teacher using Blogmeister. You can see her student blogs in the right sidebar of her blog.

Extreme Biology – this is a teacher’s biology blog, but all the posts are by her students. If you read the comments you can see that students are commenting on each other’s posts.

ADV Biology – a more traditional teacher blog in which assignments are posted.

Math 247 – this is an amazing Math blog in which students use an application called Voicethread to make animated Math movies. We can do this!

Fun Math Blog – this teacher uses his Blog as a place to post the Math Problem of the Week.

Teacher Reflection Blogs: These teachers are using their blogs as a place to reflect on their daily practice. We often get our students to reflect, and we understand the importance for their learning, but we sometimes forget that we are also learners and reflection is an important part of that process.

dy/dan – this is the blog of a Math teacher who explores some really interesting questions in his blog.

Don’s Learning Log

Remote Access – this is written by a gr 7/8 (I think) teacher in Manitoba called Clarence Fisher.

View From Room 125

The Teacher’s View

Hopefully one of these blogs will strike a cord and resonate. Happy Blogging!