eSchool News
I am always on the look out for anything that I can read that relates to my passion for learning and technology. I look through quite a bit of digital content daily and add an occasional stand-out link to my favorites for further study when I have the time to investigate. One of those sites is eSchool News Online. For quite some time, I have been subscribed to one of their email lists, receiving emails with links to some of their most recent articles. And frequently I’ll visit the links to find some thought provoking ideas. They also publish a weekly hardcopy newspaper that, for whatever reason, I received a copy of in today’s mail.
This is a great publication! I decided to check out their web site further. It’s a little full of ads, but I guess that’s why it’s free. I definately need to spend some more time looking through what appears to be a vast resource of information. But one of the things I did find today had to do with weblogging. One of the gurus of weblogging appears to be Will Richardson. Some of his thoughtful commentary appears in the ed-tech insider section of the site. One of his posts is on weblogging and describes very well one of the benefits to kids. The primary benefit: blogging compels us to think about what we want to say. I agree with this, just from my own experience. Weblogging is a powerful experience that I think many teachers know little to nothing about.
When you really deconstruct it, true blogging is a genre that requires a great deal of critical thinking skills before the writing even occurs. I would argue that thinking like a blogger is more important than writing like one.
It’s not necessarily about the writing as much as it is about the thinking. And that makes blogging a potentially powerful tool for any content area. It’s what we should be doing in schools. Will Richardson owns the weblogg-ed.com site, dealing entirely with the topic of weblogs in education.
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