The document discusses educational blogging and provides guidance from three articles on how to effectively implement blogging in the classroom. The articles advise teachers to establish guidelines before starting blogs, use blogs for educational rather than social purposes, choose secure blogging platforms, allow flexible posting styles, participate alongside students, and ensure blogs promote collaboration and reflection.

1. Educational Blogging By: Brittany Goodman

2. Menu Slides 3-5 : Sturgeon, Julie. (February 2008). Five Don’ts of Classroom Blogging. http://www.thejournal.com/articles/22014 Slides 6-8 : Deubel, Patricia. (February 2007). Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog. http://www.thejournal.com/the/newsletters/k12techtrends/archives/?aid=20257 Slides 9-11 : Ferdig, Richard and Trammell, Kaye. (February 2004). Content Delivery in the ‘Blogosphere’ . http://www.thejournal.com/articles/16626 Conclusion

3. Five Don’ts of Classroom Blogging 1. Don’t just dive in. (Sturgeon, Feb. 2008)  If you allow kids to write blogs without any kind of guidelines, there will be major problems. Students who violate rules of using foul language or bullying in their blogs will lose their internet privileges. 2. Don’t confuse blogging with social networking. (Sturgeon, Feb. 2008)  Educational blogging is not created for students to network, but to help their classmates with schoolwork and homework assignments. Giving students questions at the end of their blog will allow for much discussion and comments from other classmates. 3. Don’t leap at the freebie. (Sturgeon, Feb. 2008)  Teachers should spend the extra money for blogging websites that do not allow the students to blogging world. This will also allow for students to use these blogs solely for their classroom work.

4. Five Don’ts of Classroom Blogging (cont.) 4. Don’t force a sequential style. (Sturgeon, Feb. 2008)  Allowing for the students to post and arrange their blogs by subjects or themes will allow for them to find these postings later in the semester if need be. 5. Don’t leave the blogging to the students. (Sturgeon, Feb. 2008)  The teacher also needs to be a part of this process. Giving students positive feedback each week will allow for them to become more open and outgoing in the classroom. Even students that seem to be more shy will eventually start opening up to their teacher, even if it is through a blog post.

5. Reflection I thought that this article is great for teachers who plan on using blogging in their classroom. It allows for them to see and stay away from mistakes that other teachers and educators have made in the past. Using this article to base a blogging environment in the classroom will allow for a teacher to come away with a positive experience over all.

6. Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog Although a blog is considered a “public forum”, teachers can set up accounts to where only their classroom can view the blogs of their classmates with a username and password. Bloggers need to be sure and not offend anyone with postings or comments that are made in these blogs. The teacher can have the authority to delete anything that the students write that may seem to come off as offensive.

7. Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog The blogosphere is filled with dangers—misrepresenting opinion as fact, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, and newer trends, such as word of mouth marketing and before entering that bigger world, you can use your classroom blog to do more than help students reach instructional goals. With good moderating, you can teach them the skills for monitoring their own online behaviors. In the end, ethical self-monitoring is what ensures that the blog is a vehicle of trusted content. (Deubel, Feb. 2007)

8. Reflection This article allows for teachers and educators to build guidelines for their classroom blogs. Teachers can allow for there to be much security through these classroom blogs, so there is no outside activity going on through these educational blogs. The students’ blogs are watched by the teacher and can be taken away or redesigned at any time if the teacher suspects any offensive language or actions that could possibly be taking place.

9. Content Delivery in the ‘Blogosphere’ Blogs are useful teaching and learning tools because they provide a space for students to reflect and publish their thoughts and understandings. And because blogs can be commented on, they provide opportunities for feedback and potential scaffolding of new ideas. Blogs also feature hyperlinks, which help students begin to understand the relational and contextual basis of knowledge, knowledge construction and meaning making. (Ferdig and Trammel, Feb. 2004)

10. Content Delivery in the ‘Blogosphere’ The use of blogs allows for students of different perspectives to collaborate with each other. Blogs can be incorporated into any type of class for all reading- and writing-aged students. They can be used as a knowledge-management tool where teachers and students communicate with each other through the course of the semester, or as a tool to bring reflections or outside material into the class for everyone's benefit. Following are a number of practical suggestions that provide a good environment for successful blog integration. (Ferdig and Trammel, Feb. 2004)

11. Reflection Allowing for students to collaborate with each other will help for them to see each others’ perspectives. Blogging can help for students to write out their thoughts of classroom activities as well as publish their homework or in class assignments on a website, teaching them another way of using technology in the classroom.

12. Conclusion Each of these articles allows for teachers to gain further knowledge of blogging in the classroom. Advice is given on how to create and manage successful educational blogging, which will help for the teacher to not have any worries going into the experience. I think that, as a future teacher, I would use these kinds of sites for advice or further knowledge of how to maintain blogs in the classroom. The articles have given me hope that I can integrate some kind of technology successfully in my own classroom.