Jeff Zoul's List: Blogs

I now introduce workshop participants to classroom blogging by outlining three fundamental purposes of blogging. Those purposes are distributing, discussing, and demonstrating. What follows is a brief break-down of each of these purposes.

In the digital age, kids need to have an understanding of what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. They need to learn the technical how-to’s, as well as a more global comprehension of how to navigate the online world

It doesn’t have to be so hard. After several years of blogging with students, I’ve come up with a successful method which I hope others will find helpful. What you do before you start blogging is arguably the most important time of all.

1- What is Blogging ?
2- Difference between A Blog and a Website
3- Free Blogging Platforms for Teachers and Students
4- How to set up a blo
5-Things to Pay Heed to when Setting up a Classroom  Blog
6- Blogging Tips for Teachers
7- Advantages of Blogging in Education
8- Ways Teachers Can Use Blogs in their Classrooms
9- Examples of Successful Student, Class, and Teacher Blogs

Good points, cleverly presented regarding the benefits of breaking the traditional persuasive essay mold

Good list of educational blogs

One of the best things about blogging in the classroom is that it is a cross-curricular activity that can be used to teach any subject and develop just about any skills, from reading and writing to math, geography and everything in between. If you are still unsure about how blogging can benefit your students, here are seven reasons that might be able to persuade you as a teacher to get on board with blogging in the classroom this year.

Student blogging is a powerful tool for enabling new forms of communication and interaction between all the members of your classroom community.

the following 5 keys to helping you create blog posts that get found, get read and help you get customers.

So when I meet with any teacher who wonders how to lower the walls of their classroom and create more authentic learning opportunities, my first advice is to get students blogging.

If they’re interested, I share these steps. They grow out of my own experience working with upper elementary-aged kids, and I believe they can help any middle grades teacher successfully launch a blogging program and integrate it into the daily learning experience.

Since its conception more and more teachers from across the globe have used Quadblogging to gain a genuine audience for their learners. Whether you are a Nursery teacher in Nigeria or an University Lecturer in Uruguay, Quadblogging will Quad you and your learners up with three other classes matching your preferences selected in the sign up process.

First of all, blogging is writing, 21st-century style, plain and simple. Blogging constitutes a massive genre.  It comes in many forms, addresses myriad topics, and can certainly range in quality. For my money (which usually means free), blogging provides the best venue for teaching student writing. As bloggers, young people develop crucial skills with language, tone their critical thinking muscles, and come to understand their relationship to the world.

Using the platform Kidblog, my students wrote at least nine blog posts (some even chose to write more on their own initiative), five of them as specific writing assignments and four of them as “free posts.” By the end of the year, I could see the giant leaps their writing had taken, but I wondered, could they? So, for their final post of the year, I asked them to evaluate their growth through blogging to make a case for blogging in the 7th grade (if that was indeed what they wanted to do).  Here’s what they had to say.

To help students thrive in this medium, we first demonstrated how bloggers contribute their own thinking and elicit the thinking of others in their writing. Next we helped them create their blogs using Edublogs. Finally, we outlined the criteria for what we were looking for in their posts. We highlighted features like insightful analysis and thought-provoking questions, addressing both the Common Core State Standards and the ISTE Standards for Students to guide our plans for students’ online collaboration.

Do you ever notice the happiness on your PLN’s members faces when they are together? It is wonderful! The conferences, the edcamps and the professional development are all great. But the best moments always seem to be when folks are just together and they are happy because that is enough. In fact it’s not just enough, that is IT!

The case has been made very clear…if you want to improve, if you want to create change, if you want to move forward…you can’t wait for perfection.  You have to jump in, create action, and allow yourself to gain momentum and improvement within the process.  It is about a mindshift…moving from an idea of “try” to an action of “do“.

Whether it was Spike Cook’s (@DrSpikeCook) opening remarks about finding your passion, casual conversations over a meal, or a session lead by well-known speakers and leaders like Jeff Zoul (@Jeff_Zoul) and Jimmy Casas (@Casas_Jimmy), I kept seeing this theme about the desire for more connectedness. There’s a craving everyone seemed to have to learn from one another. NJPAECET2 had a different feeling. There was no large organization pushing a message, a policy point, or a subject area, like you might see at other conferences. It was intimate. It was friendly. And while it was an invite only event, there were teachers and educators who checked their credentials (and egos) at the door.

What a thrill! After reading my last post on blogging with my 6th-graders at my former school, my new 7th-grade colleagues embraced blogging for our grade level. As a result I have blended my previous experience with teaching writing as blogging with our more traditional writing curriculum. My hope is that this draft curriculum can serve as a transition to more vibrant and engaging writing program for today’s students.

Here is an abbreviated version of what I put together for my team.

Here are 7 good reasons why teachers should blog: