Tech Tips for Teachers!

1. Do not have students post any personal information, such as last name, phone number, home address or school name. You may choose to have your students create pseudonym’s to go by to avoid the use of their name at all.

2. Set the expectation that students will revise and edit their posts prior to publishing them. Their content can be viewed around the world so it’s important that they follow these expectations so their writing is readable.

3. Be respectful. There should be no bashing, name calling or anything offensive that could hurt a person’s feelings. Their blog can be viewed by anyone, including teachers, administrators, peers, family members so it’s important that they avoid being disrespectful.

4. When writing about their friends or classmates in their blog, it’s important that they get that person’s permission first and that they only use their first name. This goes back to keeping students safe and being respectful of others.

5. Determine how the blog will be used. Will students use it to display their work, get feedback from their peers on their writing, discuss topics they are learning? Remember: We don’t want to blog just for the sake of blogging. We want to have a purpose for using this 2.0 tool.

6. Use appropriate language. Have your students try to avoid using slang or inappropriate words due to their world wide audience.

Additional sites you may want to check out are:
Discovery Blogging Rules
Keeping Students Cybersafe!
Blogger’s Contract

So my question to you is this: What is an expectation that you will definitely set with your students when blogging and why?

Communicate with parents: Knowing that we’re all busy teachers, this might be an easy way for you to share with parents what students are doing in your class each day or each week if you do not want to commit to posting on a daily basis. Perhaps you want to highlight something special that is happening in your class, such as a unit-of-study, a guest speaker’s visit, or upcoming events. Your posts do not have to be extremely long, so don’t feel as though you have to write a book each time you post. A bonus to having this type of blog is the fact that parents can comment directly to your post and you can start building those valuable relationships with your parents.

Communicate with peers: Much like this blog, it has been designed to provide teachers with tips on the different ways technology can be used within their classroom and allows for a discussion to ensue through the comment feature. I chose to create this blog because educational technology is a topic that I strongly believe in and want to see more teachers using in their classrooms. Choosing a topic you are passionate is vital to creating this type of blog. You can also create blogs for grade level discussions on a variety of topics, such as field trips, tutoring, weekly homework assignments, lesson plans and much more. School level committees can use blogs to discuss action plans, meeting dates, and to post related Internet links.

Showcase student work: Rather than just having little Billy run home to tell their mom or dad about something great they did in school day, why not use a blog to tell the whole world about the awesome things that Billy is doing, along with the rest of your students? Post work samples, videos, or pictures that exemplify the learning that is taking place in your room. This would be a wonderful way to broaden the audience of your students and to allow them to receive a wide range of feedback from their peers, as well as from people all over the world.
A couple things to take note of when it comes to using blogs:

1. Update: If you want your blog to become a tool that parents, peers or students visit, it is important that it’s updated on a regular basis. How often you do this is up to you, but keep in mind that people will stop visiting it if it is never updated.
2. Student Confidentiality: When posting student work samples, remove any identifying information. Their first name is okay, but do not post their first and last name. If you post pictures of activities from your classroom, do not identify students by name, either.

If you would like to create your own blog, you may want to try:

• http://www.blogger.com/
• http://www.edublogs.com/
• http://www.classblogmeister.com/
• http://www.typepad.com/
• http://www.wordpress.org/

Once you’ve created your blog, I’d love to see it! If you have questions, I’d love to answer them! If you have any comments, I’d love to hear them! Please comment below.