Making Student/Teacher BlogsJust yesterday one of the teachers in my department was asking me about how he could make student blogs for his kids' writing assignments. He believes that making them "live" will motivate them more. I use blogspot.com (hence the name), but there are wordpress.com is also excellent. A cool new find (discovered at freetech4teachers.com) is BlogBooker which allows you (or your students to covert a blog into a pdf document. You can also use Pdftoword.com to change a pdf into a word document. Finally the problem with blogs is that you do not want to have to go a different url for all of your students. I use an "aggregator" which allows me to have all of the sites in one place. The best one for teaching is Bloglines.com which allows you to see when each student has updates their blogs. For more on HOW to do this go here (to a short sheet I created and will highlight later today) and look at social networking.
I enjoyed your list of blogging sites. I wrestled with this very issue last week. I'm going with a more private/practice use - Edmodo. Students will blog to the class which will update in the "news feed"; and then tag their new blog post with "JohnBlog". I already use the site and figured it wasn't worth it having them sign-up and use a completely different site.
ReplyDelete