Classroom Uses of Weblogs

Here is a very comprehensive list of ways in which you could use a blog in your classroom. These ideas were taken from: Richardson, W., (2006). Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.


You might like to create a reflective, journal-type blog to…

- reflect on your teaching experiences
- keep a log of teacher-training experiences
- write a description of a specific teaching unit
- describe what worked for you in the classroom or what didn’t work
- provide some teaching tips for other teachers
- write about something you learned from another teacher
- explain teaching insights you gain from what happens in your classes
- share ideas for teaching activities or language games to use in the classroom
- provide some how-to’s on using specific technology in the class, describing how you used this technology in your own class
- explore important teaching and learning issues


You might like to start a class blog to…

- post class-related information such as calendars, events, home-work assignments, and other pertinent class information
- post assignments based on literature readings and have students respond to their own weblogs, creating a kind of portfolio of their work
- communicate with parents if you are teaching elementary school students
- post prompts for writing
- provide examples of classwork, vocabulary activities, or grammar games
- provide online readings for you students to read and react to
- gather and organise internet resources for a specific course, providing links to appropriate sites and annotating the links as to what is relevant about them
- post photos and comment on class activities
- invite student comments or postings on issues in order to give them a writing voice
- publish examples of good student writing done in class
- showcase student art, poetry, and creative stories
- create a dynamic teaching site, posting not only class-related information, but also activities, discussion topics, links to additional information about topics they are studying in class, and readings to inspire learning
- create a literature circle (where groups of students read and discuss the same book)
- create an online book club
- make use of the commenting feature to have students publish messages on topics being used to develop language skills
- post tasks to carry out project-based learning tasks with student
- build a class newsletter, using student-written articles and photos they take
- link you class with another class somewhere else in the world

You can encourage your students (either on your Weblog using the comments feature or on their own Weblogs) to blog…

- their reactions to thought-provoking questions
- their reactions to photos you post
- journal entries
- results of surveys they carry out as part of a class unit
- their ideas and opinions about topics discussed in class

You can have your students create their own Weblog to…

- learn how to blog
- complete class writing assignments
- create an onoing portfolio of samples of their writing
- express their opinions on topics you are studying in class
- write comments, opinions or questions on daily news items or issues of interest
- discuss activities they did in class and tell what they think about them (You, the teacher, can learn a lot this way!)
- write about class topics, using newly learned vocabulary and idioms
- showcase their best writing pieces

You can also ask your class to create a shared Weblog to…

- complete project work in small groups, assigning each group to a different task
- showcase products of project-based learning
- complete a WebQuest (an online, structured research activity)

Interview with Paul Sibson - audio files

I am still trying to find a way of breaking the interview down into separate files that I can upload. So, in the meantime, here is the whole interview. I have found a way to store it online using boxnet.com

You can listen to the interview by following this link:

http://www.box.net/shared/1y1h3iskj6

Below is a list of questions/topics that were discussed in the interview:

Question 1: Can you briefly outline the relationship between teaching/learning and interactive technologies (like blogging) in your school?

Question 2: Are there advantages in changing teaching pedagogy to meet these new demands and possibilities by using this technology?

Question 3: And that must be great for parents too, to have that instant feedback. Have you had a good response from parents?

Question 4: What about the response from staff members? Because it must be hard thing for some of them to get up to speed with the new technologies.

Question 5: What does the concept of digital literacy mean to you?

Question 6: Security and digital safety is an important component of a programme like this. How have you gone about it in your school?

Question 7: Are you finding too that a lot of these (skills that are being gained through using these technologies) seem to be drawing into the key competencies?

Question 8: Have you had much ministry support in terms of implementation within the school?

Question 9: I saw that you have your own blog site as principal. Where did the decision come from to use that?

Question 10: In terms of communication. Have you had any exciting connections made through the use of blogs?

Question 11: What would your advice be to a beginner teacher who wanted to start up a blog but had no prior experience with one?

12: We use blogs in all sorts of different ways….

13: Comments and connections through the blog

How is inquiry different?

I have always loved this poem. It is by US poet, Billy Collins. Although it is about exploring poetry I think that it could just as easily be used as a way of understanding the beauty of the inquiry approach to research, the ways in which we engage on a more meaningful and deeper level when we allow ourselves time to approach topics from different directions rather than trying to squeeze everything out of it with a single, harsh approach:

Introduction to Poetry


I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

The final countdown......

We're down to the final few days of this inquiry project......in many ways although we're almost done, I actually feel like I'm really just starting......

In the past week I have set up a 'real' blog site in a classroom and have been spending time helping the class and the teacher with day-to-day management and trouble-shooting. This has been an incredibly valuable part of the project as it has allowed me to put put the learning I gained from my 'experts' into practice, and allowed me to start developing my own practical expertise.

Before Thursday I need to:

- create my presentation (I would really like to do something innovative - my 'expert' and I were talking about how great it would be for her to 'skype-in' to my presentation so she could be involved)
- find a way to host my MP3 interview files on the internet so that I can embed them into my blog
- edit the video from Villa and find a way to use this in my presentation
- reflect on the inquiry process and the ways in which I can use it in classroom (including thinking about linkages to the Key Competencies)

There is lots to do!!!

In addition to this, I have started thinking about what I want to do with this blog once my project is over? - how can I take it to the next level? - how can I keep contributing to it in a way that would be beneficial to the students in our class? I'm not exactly sure of the answers to these questions yet, but I'm sure that presenting on Thursday will help me find answers.

Maintaining a blog site....

Since setting up the website I have been helping the classroom teacher (my mum) maintain the blog site. I was interested in seeing just how much time was involved in this task.

After the first day it was clear that there were some things that needed to be addressed to ensure that the blog was meeting the purpose it was set up for. E.g. some students appeared to be using it more like a facebook wall, posting one-line comments that had very little substance to them.

As a result of these observations a list was created of things to discuss with the students at school the next day:



I also showed mum ways in which she can use the blog to communicate with her students. She then decided make a couple of posts over the weekend:



This first post was about Goodnight Mr Tom that they will be watching in class next week. Links were provided to vidoes relating to the book including an interview with the author and a powerpoint about the children who were sent out of British cities during WW2 (which helps the students understand the context in which the book takes place). Posting these on a blog site is a really good way of extending the teaching around the book/film and allowing student to do some independent research in their own time. I think this function of a blog could be very valuable in all curriculum areas.


A number of students in the class enjoyed 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe'. This post is a link to the Harper Collins Narnia website and includes interactive games, quizzes etc.

Setting up a classroom blog site - putting theory into practice

Last week I set up a classroom blog for a Year 7 & 8 class at Villa Maria. This was an incredibly valuable process in terms of gaining a better understanding of the practicalities involved in the process. It is one thing to create a person blog that you update and manage in your own time. A blog that you have complete control and responsibility over. It is a very different thing to create a classroom blog. A blog that will be used by students, and potentially viewed by parents.

So how did I go about this process and what did I learn along the way that would be valuable lessons to share?

- It was important to ensure that the creation of a blog was a collective process between me and the students. If students are involved in the creation stage, then they ultimately take a greater degree of ownership for it and are more likely to maintain it in a responsible manner. I guess the pride they feel in having created it means that they have a vested interest in ensuring that it continues to be used (and not abused) by people.

- When setting up the blog I worked with a small group of students who were selected by the teacher. I had two year 7s and two year 8s. I don’t think I would set up the blog with any more than 4 students as it would get too complicated in terms of each person sharing their opinions on layout/design etc. The other good thing about blogger is that you can always go back and change the design/layout at a later stage if you want to.



- Once the students had set up the blog I needed to send out an e-mail to each student inviting them to join the blog. This was more problematic than I had envisaged as some e-mails got ‘lost’ in cyberspace and it took a while to add in each student’s e-mail address. It also got me thinking how you would do this in a classroom where students didn’t have their own e-mail accounts. I spoke with a friend who uses blogs in her classroom and she explained that there is a way that you can ‘add’ people to your g-mail account giving them a separate log-in but keeping a single e-mail address. This is something I will have to explore further to see how teachers navigate this obstacle.

- After morning tea the whole class came to the computer room so that I could teach a lesson on blogging. I decided that before I got them on their blog I wanted to cover some important aspects of blogging with them (see attached powerpoint). These included:
• What do we know about blogs?
• How do we want to use our blog?
• Internet Safety and Responsible Behaviour Guidelines
• Writing a blog post
• Commenting on a blog post

- Approaching the setting up of a blog in this way allowed a number of discussions to take place about what kind of blog they wanted, the kinds of things they wanted on it, and issues of security and accessibility. It was decided that this blog will initially be visible only to the students and teacher in the class. They decided that they will use the blog for a few weeks and assess how things are going. Is it being used? Is it being used appropriately? Is it easy to update (or are we spending a lot of class time doing it)? It is adding value to our learning (inside and outside of the class). At the end of this time they will then ask themselves some new questions:
• Would we like to allow our families/friends access to this blog?
• Would we like to add our blog to the school intranet so that other classes can view it?
• Is a blog site something that the other intermediate classes could benefit from too? Would we like to help them set up blog sites for their classes?


- Part of the intro to blogging involved students exploring other blog sites (especially ones created by school students).



- It was important to establish ground rules in terms of the blog. The most important ground rule related to ‘appropriateness’ of posts. To emphasise this point I modelled examples of different things that could be included on the blog and we discussed whether we thought these things were appropriate. Ultimately we made the distinction between the things we would share on a social networking site like Facebook and those that we wanted on this blog which was set up to share the work of students in the class (and achievements and interests outside of class - that are linked to learning)

- Language: We made the decision that this is a formal blog site and therefore students need to use correct spelling and grammar when posting.

- Labels: Over the next week students are going to develop a list of labels to use in their blog postings. This will help with the categorizing of posts on the site and for searching.

The Inquiry Process - Reflecting