Learning about Blogs 101

I have had the opportunity to begin my very first blog! I've never had a blog before, so please forgive my extreme excitement! For my very first post, I have decided to give you an article about web blogs and also a couple of teacher resource blogs that you might want to RSS to. So, until next time...happy blogging!
Annette

Web 2.0 Article:
Catalano, Frank (December 2005). “Why Blog?” T.H.E. Journal, http://www.thejournal.com/articles/17616

This article would be interesting to an educator because it offered some excellent reasons why blogging is such a powerful classroom tool. It discussed how blogging could benefit student-teacher interactions and academic interests. The article had excerpts from classroom blog topics where students wanted more interaction outside of the classroom. The teacher extended the blogs so they could use them at home and even over the summer. The article could also be of interest to educators because it offers suggestions to improve parent-teacher communication. It gave ideas for the blog to become a school to home link with frequent updates and calendar items. Lastly, the article also gave some blog rules that educators need to consider before beginning a blog. Overall, this article offered some valuable ideas to consider when deciding whether or not to blog as an educator.

3 Blogs:
Always Learning Blog: http://mscofino.edublogs.org/
This blog is by a girl named Kim. She is the Literacy Specialist in Bangkok, Thailand. She is such an innovative technology guru! Her blog discusses many topics that interest the elementary technology-geared teacher. She offers up many ideas about how she helps plan non-intimidating technology activities with teachers to make sure the curriculum is the focus and the technology compliments it. Her blog offers lots of ideas and tools that an ordinary teacher could read and put into action immediately. Her passion for technology is infectious!

Teacher’s Bag of Tricks (Tips for the Classroom): http://teachersbag.edublogs.org/
This blog is useful to an educator because it offers a lot of good website suggestions for students as well as tools that the teacher can utilize in the classroom. She gives resources for hands-on activities, interventions for lower learners, and even other things such as subject-based ideas, classroom management tools, and technology plans. This site has a lot to offer to an educator with its many resources.

...Totally off the teacher tech tips record:
Scrappy World: http://judithmara.wordpress.com/
Since I already had 2 professional blogs, I chose one of my favorite hobbies for a blog. This blog is all about scrapbooking! Judith’s site attracted my attention because it gave a lot of neat ideas for scrapbooking for the different holidays, seasons, and monthly events. She offered neat phrases you could use to design a scrapbook page. She also listed many holidays for each month to get ideas. One of the last things I enjoyed about her page was her picture ideas for creating pages.

Thanks for reading,
Annette