The Librarians at the school have asked me to develop some professional development around blogs for them. I'm going to make some notes, and start here with them.
Why we blog.
From the WA Department of Education and Training.
"Blogs provide a communication space that teachers can utilise with students whenever there is a curriculum need to develop writing, share ideas and reflect on work being undertaken in the classroom."
From the site Designing e-learning.
"Blogs can be easily maintained and updated through a standard web browser without the need for additional technologies. They are often free of charge to establish'.
What Wiki has to say about blogs.
"A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.
As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs."
How we blog.
There are numerous amounts sites that allow you to blog on the internet. Most of them are free.
- http://www.thoughts.com/
- http://edublogs.org/
- http://www.typepad.com/
- http://www.xanga.com/
- http://www.livejournal.com/
- http://www.blog-city.com/
My choice of blogging site is www.blogger.com/
About the layout of a blog How To Blog: A Beginner's Blog Publishing Guide
Posts are actually arranged in reverse chronological order, which means that when you visit a blog on the web, the latest story will appear at the top of the website, and the earlier ones will descend in order beneath it, by how recently they were published to the web.
Posts have a subject or header - just as a newspaper article, or email does
They then have a subject or body - the main part of the post, again just like an email
They most usually have comments - a way that readers can respond to what's been said. This is an important part of blogging, which is much more conversational than print media. As soon as you write something, your readers have a chance to respond to it
They quite often have a time and date stamp - so that readers know how recent the post is. Commonly people aren't so interested in reading out of date posts. Blogging is very much an "of the moment" phenomenon, and while you might create "evergreen" content, it's likely that at least some of your posts will be time sensitive.
Have you read any blogs from Librarians?
Why don't you check out Librarian in Black or the The Shifted Librarian or maybe the Librarian.net.
2 comments:
IMHO. edublogs would be the best way to go; for a school!
Keeps it all safe and above board.
Do you think blogger is not safe for a school blog? I see that your own blog, and the blog for the PIC Photographic Imaging College are with Blogger. Have you thought about moving the service?
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