Blogs

Here's a good definition from Blogger.com, one of the sites that offers free blog accounts. For educators, blogs can make it easy to publish homework assignments and classnotes without the hassles of coding and uploading. They also provide an easy outlet for student publishing. At least one school division in Virginia is using blogs for teacher websites and school board minutes. This article from The Christian Science Monitor discusses how wired schools can help keep students and parents informed.

Will Richardson is one educator who has been working with blogs. You can read a recent article from Multimedia and Internet@School concerning blogs. In the article, Richardson gives a good introduction to the blogging technology and describes his own use with his high school English students who used their blog to talk with Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees. Richardson's blog can be found at http://www.weblogg-ed.com/.

Once you find a blog or two that you like, you can look at those bloggers' “blog rolls” in which they link to other blogs. Pretty soon, you'll find that you have a long list of blogs that you enjoy reading. It can be difficult to visit all those blogs every day. A new technology called RSS (Real Simple Syndication) allows blog readers to subscribe to favorite blogs, using a software program called a newsreader to read the blogs as they are updated. Here's an article by blogger Dave Pollard that describes RSS and newsreaders. I personally like bloglines.com as a place online where I can organize my blog reading, which includes newfeeds from The New York Times and the BBC.