Final Project.... phewww!

This was quite the journey... after much deliberation and frustration, I finally settled on which hosting site to use for my class blog. Although I am somewhat at peace with my choice, I am still not completely satisfied. The problems encountered were which site could give me all the posting and publishing options that I wanted and give them to me for FREE! But oh, no, that was being waaay too optimistic. So I found that every single one of them had some catch that I didn't really like. To get all the features I quickly realized I was gonna have to pay for it! Anyway, after experimenting and building 3 different class blogs, I decided to go with Weebly since it's very easy to use and I already had another site with them for my XC Ski Team that I was pretty satisfied with the outcome. Only the Pro version however, allows you to embed... or so I thought. However, I found a little trick to get around that stumbling block. If you use the custom HTML feature, you can paste the embed codes directly in to that window and get the document, or whatever embedded via the free version. I cannot tell you how happy this made me... or how long it took me to figure this out! So here is my new, school-color-coordinated and customized Lathrop Malemute Science classroom blog.
I was able to add Google calendars to each class page that I can use to post assignments, due dates, etc. etc. My students first task will be to learn how to use the blog via the Tips for Blogging Success page. As for their first science related task, I have made an Ecology Voicethread for my AP Bio students to use for the introduction to their Ecology unit. For Chemistry, I am started with a task involving the Periodic Chart but haven't yet got that fully worked out. Additionally, I am still working on a Prezi for my AP Bio as well but I am not quite finished with it. That is soon to come!

Good Example of How to Use a Blog

So visited some other class blogs and I particularly liked this one called Scattergood Biology hosted by Edublogs. He has a page on there for his students with links to Edblogs help pages for all the how-to's for logging in, posting, how much to write, etc. etc. I particularly like the links he put there for more info about each point he makes. I thought it was a good set of guidelines so I'll probably do something similar for my class blog. I still am fiddling around with which hosting site to use. I've used Wetpaint before for my first wiki and it's okay but they don't have ad-free versions anymore for educators. The other one I've used is Weebly. It's really good and you can get an ad-free educators page. Here's mine that I made for my XC Ski team. The tech guy at my school recommended Edublogs or Wikispaces for Teachers. He said Edublogs was better though.

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!