Blog

 Blogger

Blogging is about sharing. You can share opinions, thoughts, ideas, concepts, resources, links, activities, lessons, etc. The first step in creating a blog is determining the focus of your blog. What are you going to discuss? What are you going to share?

Blogging provides an area for you to reflect. The great thing about sharing your reflections is it provides an opportunity for you to communicate with others about your personal reflections. In education, discussion alone can breed some of the best outcomes for you as a teacher.

The great thing about Blogging is that if offers up a way to find other people who share your interest because they will read and comment on your blog. You then have found another way to create a Professional Learning Network. Blogging brings educators together. Blogging can be a powerful tool in becoming a better educator.

What is also great about a blog is that you don’t necessarily have to share. It can be a private electronic journal that you keep about your experiences as an educator. A great way to keep those memories from all those days you were a teacher. Then when you retire, you can go back and look at them and write a book about the life of a teacher. I always said one day I wanted to write a book about “Funny Things Students Say, Ask, Suggest, and Think.” If I had kept a blog, I would have had the memories stored up to look back upon.

WordPress

WordPress is a free, Web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website or blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But, thanks to the efforts of a large “open source” community of WordPress programmers working to extend and improve its capabilities, WordPress has become much more than just a tool for bloggers.

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination.

In  addition to online resources like the forums and mailing lists a great way to get involved with WordPress is to attend or volunteer at a WordCamp, which are free or low-cost events that happen all around the world to gather and educate WordPress users, organized by WordPress users. 

Today’s WordPress is really a “content management system” (CMS), which means that it can be used to run full-sized, social media-rich business websites.

  

Edublogs

Blogs can serve many purposes for teachers. You can use a blog to communicate information to parents and students. You can use a blog to create a running journal of classroom activities and lessons throughout the year. Blogs can be used by students to record and reflect on their own learning. Make your students contributing authors on a class blog and have them write a weekly reflection on their own learning.

Three good platforms for classroom blogging are Blogger, Edublogs, and Kid Blog. All three of those platforms are very easy to start as they don't require any technical knowledge on your part. All three of those platforms allow you to control your blog's visibility settings.

Tools for the 21st Century Teacher - By: Michael Zimmer