Blogging is a type of website that serves a social networking function that allows the writer to express thoughts, ideas, and communicate. That seems to simple a definition though. A blog is created by a person (or a group of people) in order to organize thoughts and information, usually on a specific idea or theme: like education, a classroom, a political ideal, the list is endless. Then, people who have been granted access can view the blogs to see the posts/information that are within the blogs. Blogging allows the blogger to share information with a wide variety of people and to have control over who sees that information (should they wish to enable those controls.) Some bloggers also have links to other blogs and websites on their blogs.
Some of the education blogs I previewed used a classroom blog for a variety of purposes. Some classroom blogs seemed to be a list of assignments and useful information aimed at both students and parents of that classroom; these blogs would outline the requirements of an assignment, due dates, important ideas to remember for the assignment, and other ideas the teacher thought might be useful for those students. Other education blogs I previewed used their classroom blogs to create a forum for students to "speak" to each other in written forums. Often these sites required the students to comment on each other's posts, to create their own blogs, and to post responses to activities done in class. Here the students were very interactive with the material and could "publish" work for not only their classmates and teachers to see, but also anyone who accessed the classroom site.
I previewed one blog in particular that seemed to be a hybrid of a website and a blog. This site:
www.twrctank.com is titled Resources for Teaching Reading aka The TWRCtank. The site was created by a reading specialist in order to give educators a forum to preview reading strategies for struggling readers. Julie Petersen was a elementary teacher and then became a reading specialist. She hopes to share her experiences as a teacher and specialist to aid other educators with understanding and helping their struggling readers. I found her posts to be incredibly easy to read and incredibly informative. Though I hope to teach secondary English I hope to use her ideas on literacy in my classroom. TWRCtank also includes links to other blogs and websites that Petersen finds useful in the area of literacy. I like the idea that I can access the expertise of an educator in the field to wade through the thousands of blogs and websites to find those most relevant sites and share them with her readers. Also on the site are links to games that students can play that will help them with grammar, spelling, phonics, and other reading strategies. I didn't even know that these sites existed. This site will be on my delicious account and I will access it for information on how to best serve my struggling readers.
