Classroom Blogs

Upon browsing the links and articles for WEEK 5, the article on the Top 10 reasons to have a classroom blog was a good list of ways to incorporate a blog into your classroom. I have had a class web page since around 1999 that I created using Dreamweaver. The page was a place for me to post a weekly assignment calendar, resource links for my students to use for various lessons that I taught and also to post announcements to parents. However, it was solely my web page and students had no ability to post information or comment. Then last year I decided to try to use a wiki for a class project. Boy have I come a long way since then! I learned a lot from that first attempt at a wiki. First of all, it was just for one specific project and I used it strictly for kids to post their information and comment on each other's projects. But I really didn't think about using it as my primary communicating device for my class. Now that I see all the other ways it can be utilized I'm really excited about setting one up for this year. Dreamweaver seems like such a archaic tool now to me.
Upon further browsing, the following were helpful to me the "Do's and Donts of Wikis 2" and Eric's Slideshare on the effects on student learning of using a classroom blog in science teaching: Shiny Objects, Classroom Practice and Professional Growth. I'm really excited about incorporating all of these really effective teaching tools, but at the same time it is daunting to think about all the time required to build them for integration and use. Our time for experimentation with them in lesson planning and preparation is so short!