Student Weblogs
Weblogs seem to be one of those ‘emerging technologies’ in education. Although they have been around for a few years, they are only just now being seen by education as something potentially valuable. I am doing an independent study this semester on weblogs, and I noticed a post to the edtech listserv from David Warlick. David also sees the value of weblogs for the classroom and has developed a weblogging tool that is part of his larger Landmark Project web site. The direct link to the Blogmeister tool is here.
One of the big concerns with blogging in education is how do we control the content of something where students can post anytime/anywhere onto a site that is district endorsed. Well David has tried to (and I think pretty successfully) built a tool that requires posts to be teacher-approved before they are viewable to the public. This is a pretty impressive feature for a tool that is free. There is also a neat little diagram on the left side of the Blogmeister page that shows how the site works.
Another concern about blogging in education is that it is just an online journal. Well it doesn’t have to be, and David provides us with a few ideas about blogging in education:
(1) post homework and project assignments; (2) post texts for students to read, research, reflect, and then respond to in a formal way using the comments feature.
I’ve forwarded the link to some teachers at the high school and middle school who I know are interested in the whole blogging experience. Hopefully we can come up with some ideas to add to David’s list.
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