By Courtney Cooper

Article 1: Communications – To Blog Or Not To Blog

Article 2: Techtalk: Web 2.0, Blogs, and Developmental Education

Article 3: Learning with Blogs and Wikis

Blogging can go both ways…◦ Some blogs get bitter with aggressive responders

and battered with acrimonious exchanges….

◦ This could make them not worth your time or effort

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On the other hand… Blogs can◦ Humanize school leaders◦ Blogs offer parents, teachers, and other key

community leaders a glimpse into the educator’s mind and what their values are

◦ Set records straight – quickly and authoritatively◦ It only takes a few minutes a day (Carr, 2006)

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A blogging policy checklist (are NOT okay)◦ Blogging on school or district time◦ Revealing confidential information◦ Bullying or attacking another student online, or disrupting

school climate, whether using school or home computers◦ Inappropriate contact with students via personal blogs◦ Violating student privacy or any local, state, or federal

laws◦ Writing defamatory comments about colleagues,

students, parents, school, or school district◦ Posting obscene, abusive, harassing, threatening,

intimidating, hateful, or embarrassing information about another person or organization

◦ ( Legal Guide for Bloggers www.eff.org or the Media Law Resource Center www.medialaw.org)

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Reflection: This article showed me how negative blogs can be, whether they are intended to or not. It provided a great example of how blogs can get read in a different tone then they were intended, which can lead to angry comments.

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Millennial students now entering college are very comfortable blogging to keep in touch with their friends, write about their lives, or complain about their teachers (Deloitte Consulting, 2005).

Middle school students are utilizing blogs to engage students through Learnerblogs for teachers to connect with students and encourage participation in class (Hetherington, 2006).

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Blogs allow for ease of idea sharing and construction, provide meters that monitor a posting’s readership, and offer the potential to link beyond the blog to confirmatory sources of information and even other comments in blogs through blogrolls.

Allow for dialoguing with others about ideas, reflecting on one’s experiences, and developing a sense of community (Davies & Merchant, 2007).

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Reflection: After the last article I read, which included a lot of negative comments about blogging, this article was very refreshing and reminded me of all the great things that could come from blogging.

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Changing Times, Changing Tools◦ There’s a new emphasis on the importance of

collaborative learning among members of close-knit teams in schools.

◦ Portals through which new knowledge about teaching and learning can enter schools Like writing blogs about teaching and learning,

bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice

With the investment of a bit of time and effort, you can follow others who can expose you to more interesting ideas in one day than you could find in the past 10 years of costly professional development – Bill Ferriter

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Feed Readers◦ Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free

tools that can automatically check nearly any website of new content dozens of times each day, limiting the amount of time spent browsing the thoughts and ideas of trusted writers Elmore, 2002).

◦ Pageflakes www.pageflakes.com has developed a teacher

version of its tool (http://teacher.pageflakes.com) This includes an online grade tracker, a task list, and

a built –in writing tutor

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Reflection: This article was my favorite because it offered a lot of good information about blogging along with some good tips to get started! It even provides different blogs that the author finds interesting by going to www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16618841

So all you need to do is dedicate a few minutes each day, tell others how much you enjoy having your thinking stretched by the blogs you read and share feed reader with your learning team and begin to explore together!

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Overall this module was my favorite because everything seemed to come together and I used many of the new tools that we learned about in W200. Learning about blogging was one of my favorite things to do, so this allowed me to elaborate more about blogging and learn a lot of new opportunities that I can take advantage of when I become an educator!

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Carr, N (2006).Communications To blog or not to blog. American School Board Journal. 46-47.

Caverly, D., Nicholson, S., Battle, J., & Atkins, C. (2008). Techtalk: Web 2.0, blogs, and developmental education. Journal of Developmental Education, 32, 34-35.

Ferriter, B (2009).Learning with blogs and wikis. Educational Leadership. 34-38.

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