Teaching with blogs

I got a bit carried away and spent way too much time checking out blogs and not enough writing about them.

First of all, I set up a blog for my students to use on edublog. I'm hoping to use it for homework as some of the examples of blogs did. My problem will be getting my director to approve this but I will print out some of the info from Safe and Responsible Bloggings.

My favorite education blog so far would be the High School Journalism blog. The format is so close to what I would like to do with my Social Studies classes. There are lots of prompts for discussion and also some news items to comment about. I do something similar but my students bring me their thoughts in writing and it's not so interactive as many of them are shy to discuss it in class (eventhough I offer extra credit for doing so). As almost all of my students are adept at using "myspace" I'm betting they will feel more comfortable with blogging for homework.

One blog that had potential but left me cold after seeing some of the others was "Highschool AP Government". The teacher was using it for various class assignments which was great but it was done in such a cold and boring way that it was uninviting. I mention it because I realized that while the concept of blogs is so "cool", it doesn't mean that all blogs are good blogs and we need to make them enticing to our audience or else we are just creating a different mode to dish out the same old boring stuff.

At the blog mhetherington.net there were a lot of examples of using podcasts for teaching. I'm going to study this more as I'm dying to get started using podcasting with my students.