"A number of educators have already embraced blogging and are active bloggers. Here are some links to a few on the Internet: Blogging from the Barrio: A Tech Sensei’s Blog from Chicago’s Barrio of Pilsen, K-12blogWrite, and Schoolblogs. Some schools are using the blogs as an electronic alternate to school newsletters for parents and area residents while others are internal communication tools aimed at teachers and administrators.
But blogs could be so much more. How about incorporating blogs in a lesson plan on using search engines, on using news aggregators, or evaluating online resources? Or in a journalism class on detecting bias? Or in a computer class on how to document code? Here is an example of how one class used a blog to communicate what they learned about Tudor Exploration in their social studies class: Tudor Exploration. Schoolblogs has many other examples as well. If as a librarian you helped students find resources for a history blog like the Tudor Exploration one mentioned above, the blog could turn into an online history fair....
Let’s take an example. Say you are working with the school’s science department on an ecology project, like the study of a local river. Students could create a blog to track their daily/weekly observations of the river in question after explaining their hypothesis in their first blog post. They may also use a news aggregator, like that included in Userland’s Radio, to track local news item that are relevant to their project (possibly online newspaper stories on dumping of wastes into the river) and post those to their blog. They may also post to their blog links to other sites on the Internet that reference the river’s history, impact on the community, etc. These web links could come from the local historical society’s web site to a doctoral dissertation a graduate student in environmental science did on river ecologies. The students would not only learn about river ecologies as part of their science unit, but also develop information literacy skills for the 21st century." [Teacher Librarian]
And if you're a librarian in SLS, we'll host your blog for you using Movable Type (or possibly Manila). That offer is open to al of our libraries, including the schools.
