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Informational Resources

These personal spaces are becoming more and more popular as well as extremely helpful as more and more tech-savvy educational and technological experts are creating their own unique weblogs.  You no longer have to wait for monthly or quarterly magazines to stay abreast of the most current trends in education, technology and business.  These passionate webloggers and blogvangelists update daily.  Our aggregator aggregates a growing list of educational news feeds, from bloggers and newspapers.

Course, Classroom, or School Management Systems

Weblogs can contain course content such as syllabi, assignments, links to articles for reading and updates. Teachers in the elementary setting are using them to share: daily outcomes, upcoming units, activities or links for parents to use at home, homework, spelling words, handouts, permission forms, reminders, and more easily facilitated communication between home and school.  They can also enable teachers to post and update materials with more ease, efficiency, and flexibility. School Administrators are using them to better communicate with parents, community, faculty members, and other administrators.

Student, Class, Teacher or Art Portfolio's

Many weblog tools automatically archive older materials as new content is posted. This is a useful feature, as it allows a student to sift through a term's worth of materials (or more) and draw connections between materials posted at different times during the development process. An application of this could be student learning journals with a multimedia twist.

Collaborations or Collections

Blogs are also being used to connect people and groups over geographical space and time.  Some examples of possible collaboration configurations are: student-student, class-class, class-expert, student-teacher, teacher-mentor, or teacher-teacher.  Collaboration can also take place within a school, within a grade level or across grade levels. Weblogs are also being used to showcase and collect exemplary samples of student writing, creativity, and ideas.

Electronic Filing Cabinets

Instead of sending one-shot emails with links to great articles and resources that will eventually get erased by accident or alleged accident.  Create an informational page storing the links to the articles and resources so faculty members can browse, discuss and possibly post additional information, or resources.  With our multimedia friendly weblogs you could even upload and store; documents, PowerPoints, audio / video, and much more.  You have an up-to-date educational resource site for your school or county.

Professional Learning Community Blogs

A way to bring professionals together outside of the school day.  Educators can log on from school or home to read, discuss and learn more about topics of interest.  Such a model could be used to facilitate a study group from a school or group of schools.  Resources could be shared, readings discussed, questions asked and suggestions given all on the web.  This would ease administrators job of ensuring high-quality professional development because an electronic record would be available of the professional discussion and activity that has taken place during the study group or professional learning community.

Enhanced Reading Experience

The ease of inserting hypertext into weblog posts along with the multimedia friendly uploading of files, documents, and audio/video make weblogs a great way to motivate or extend the typical informational paragraph.  It allows teachers to more easily build background and create concrete understandings of the content through the assistance of pictures, diagrams, slide-shows, maps, time-lines, audio/video.

Enhancing Literacy/Language Discussions

Teachers are using weblogs to conduct on-line literature circles, article discussions, art reviews and feedback, and to extend or continue classroom discussions.  These discussions can happen across various content examples (Alan November suggests in science they can be used to reflect on labs, social studies for current events, English for prewriting, or to discuss central themes of novels.)  They are even being used by math teachers to spark interest, extend student thinking, or have them reflect on math concepts or real-world math applications.

This is taken from Weblogs in Education
We've re-written it into British English and added more pertinence to our platform and objectives.