Blogging to Support Literacy

Blogs in Plain English

Blogs you have to read

• A Difference by Darren Kuropatwa. Read his latest post and listen to the VoiceThread embedded on 'Questions about Blogging in the Classroom'
• Around the Corner by Miguel Guhlin.
• Bud the Teacher by Bud Hunt
• Cool Cat Teacher by Vicki Davis
• E-Learning Blog by Julie Lindsay
• The FischBowl by Karl Fisch
• Hey Jude by Judy O'Connell
• Ideas and Thoughts from an Edtech by Dean Shareski
• Learning in Hand by Tony Vincent
• The Open Classroom by Jo McLeay
• Practical Theory by Chris Lehmann
• Tech Learning Blog (various authors)
• The Thinking Stick by Jeff Utecht
• 2c Worth by David Warlick
• Always Learning by Kim Cofino
• Edublog Insights by Anne Davis

Great Blogging Resources!

• Sustained Blogging by Jeff utecht (presentation for K12 Online conferecne 2007)
• 7 Things you should know about blogs from Educause
• Web 2.0 Workshop on Atomic Learning
• # EdubloggerWorld on Ning
• Support Blogging wiki
•  My Delicious Tags
• Bloglines is an RSS aggregator. It has a sharing facility as well. Here are my Bloglines
• Books: Classroom Blogging by David Warlick
• Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will Richardson

Starting a blog!

Blogger.com is a free, user-friendly environment for starting a blog and blogging. It provides the facility of being able to have one set of login data to blogger.com, from which a variety of different blogs can be made. Although I have had success with Blogger blogs in the classroom with students as well as for my own personal use I would encourage teachers to look at learnerblogs for student use.

eduspaces.net is a newer learning environment. It is a tool for online communities to share, present, blog, and interact. This year I am using this blogging software in order to explore the facilities of ELGG and to try something different.

Blog Toys

Technorati (for publicizing and tracking your blog)

Talkr  ('speaks' your blog post)

GCast (embed audio)

ClustrMaps (put a map on a web page and track the location and number of visitors)

GeoVisitors (another location and tracking tool)

NeoWorx (another location and tracking with cool visual features)

MyBlogLog (reports details of who is looking at your blog)

ClockLink (put clocks on a web page and set them to different times)

Library Thing (feed your favourite books onto the blog)

Also, don't forget about feeding photos through flickr and bookmarks through delicious onto your blog (various formats available)

Blog Toys