Educational+blogs

=Educational Blogs=

I have chosen blogs that have been recently updated and consistently maintained to give some ideas of how regular educational bloggers keep their pages organised and the sorts of activities that are used.

[] The winner of the Edublog Best Class Blog Award for 2010, it still seems to be very teacher directed, with not many student contributions, or use of the 'comment' feature. While it does showcase student work, to me it seems to be a website set up on a blog platform, rather than following a formal blog template.

[] Mr McClung teaches Year 8 social studies, runs the cross country program etc in Arkansas and keeps it on his blog. Well updated, lots of posts, different pages for different activities. While it includes a page of 'Student Work' this is more 'scrapbook' style rather than responses to blog posts - the students' works are posted one after the other with no explanation of the purpose of each one.

[] Larry Ferlazzo has a number of blogs that he uses for his English language teaching and general teaching resources. Interestingly, he also has a website, which appears to be where he puts his classes' work, links etc: []

[] A winner of various blog awards, this is a well organised blog with a range of topics. I had been noticing that a lot of blogs seemed to be reflective, or aimed specifically at teachers. Kalingo presents a graph that suggests that 45% of blogs are aimed specifically at teachers, 33% at students and 20% at both. ([])

[] A news / information site for parents and grandparents rather than set up for the students' use. A legitimate, and popular, way of using the free blog sites by teachers.

In summary, it can be difficult to find good educational blogs that are following the blog 'journal' template, which suggests that it is not a feasible structure for teaching, yet the ease of use is appealing to many educators.