Why educators should blog

I know what you're thinking. You have lesson plans, parent meetings, grading and you're supposed to throw blogging on top of the work load.

Photo from http://www.themactech.com/wp-content/frustrated.jpg 

Increasingly, education is becoming a matter of accessibility. It's why Jefferson Elementary opens its doors an hour early for its students, offering Mandarin Chinese class twice a week. It's why 10 campuses offer after school programs, most of which provide instruction on subjects not covered during the traditional school day. It's why higher education is offering more and more online classes.

So if you can provide additional instruction that students can access with the click of the mouse, why wouldn't you take advantage of that?


The Internet is a jungle of information. Students have grown up with this huge portal of learning, but they don't know the best places to look.

Teachers do.

Blogging provides teachers a way to provide targeted instructional materials to students. It's to show students that there are ways of obtaining information beyond Wikipedia. It's a way to show students a video that was relevant to last week's lecture. Or to show them a news article that applies current events to tomorrow's lesson.

Blogging also provides teachers a controlled environment for interacting with students via the Web.

Working with students on Facebook and MySpace can be inappropriate because those are geared for social interaction.With a blogging tool, such as Blogger, teachers can still create dialog with a comment window, but moderate the  message by restricting who can comment and by remaining the sole contributor.

I'll write a little bit more on blogging later. My plan is to post about setting up your own Blogger account tomorrow. But for this post, I want to leave you with some examples of teacher blogs.

I found this list on the Scholastic Web site, Top 20 Teacher Blogs.  Here are two of my favorites:

The Teaching Palette blog is targeted for art teachers. It may look like a complicated blog, but I will show you how to put together something similar using free tools found online. This looks like a WordPress blog, which is another free software for blogging found online.

On this blog, notice the layout, specifically the mix of photos, text and videos.

The Science Fix is the blog of a middle school science teacher. This guy uses a lot of videos in his blog. But the best part of this blog is that his videos are the appropriate length and they are easy to duplicate. 

Teachers, you can put videos like this together with a Flip or Kodak or camera built into your standard digital camera. These videos can be edited in a basic Windows Movie Maker-like program as well. 

Just think, your students could go home and do these experiments on their own. You could incorporate that for homework. Also, students could comment on the posts if they have any problems with the experiments, a very appropriate way to interact online with students, as opposed to Instant Messaging or Facebook.