I have been searching for a way for teachers to ease into using blogs for classroom activities. We do not have student email at this time and so I wanted to come up with a way for students and teachers to blog without it being complicated. This is what I have come up with for a beginning.

Setting up the blog:

Go to http://learnerblogs.org/

Register a blog for yourself.

• There are some tutorials you can go through if you like.
• You can come to the lab and I will help you set it up.
• You will be the administrator and monitor all comments.

Create a rubric

Create a post that your students must respond to.

You can also require students to respond to one other student’s comment on the post Some suggestions for comment requirements:

• Comment must relate to the post.
• Comment must not contain any inappropriate material
• Comments must not contain instant messaging language, must use proper grammar, correct spelling and punctuation.

Before you have your students post their comments spend some time discussing what you feel is appropriate and what you expect. You can show them some examples of some educational blogs (see me if you need some links to use) to illustrate how this can be done.

Create a spreadsheet of student names and elements from the rubric and anything else you want to base your grades on.

• Open your spreadsheet and check off the elements as you read the student comments.

This is a starting point that that will allow you to use a classroom blog using student comments. If you want to include some posts by the students you as the administrator will have to post for them. They could write their post and save it to their folder on the server and I can retrieve it and send it to you so you can post it to the blog. I can point you to some class blogs for some examples of how other teachers have utilized blogging with their classes. I would appreciate any suggestions out there.

All of this information came from other sources. In particular I want to thank http://mhetherington.net/blogs/ and http://anne.teachesme.com/