Classroom Blogs

One of the reasons I am keeping this blog is to familiarize myself with the conventions of this type of publication so that at some point in the future I can use it as a tool in the classroom, either as a regular part of the English curriculum or as an option for tech-savvy students. So while I am moving from blog to blog, as I did last night, I'm keeping an eye out for models of classroom practice that look promising. Will Richardson's blog continues to be an amazing source. He has a link in his November 27 post to a sixth grade classroom page which looks really good. There is a home page for the class, and individual links in the sidebar to each student's individual blog. What is even cooler is that they have been able to use the Google Reader package to aggregate every student's most recent post on one page, so you don't have to click from page to page to see what's new for each kid, and to navigate to the individual pages from there. The whole thing is very clean and elegant. On the home page there are links to some other classroom-based blogs, including Darren Kuropatwa's great-looking one for a pre-calc math class. Click on his name in the sidebar and you find that he has set up several other pages as well, including one for an AP Calc AB class.

And as long as we're in surfing mode, take a look—especially you soccer fans—at this whop-jaw photoblog. It plays as a slide show, but you can select images to view by putting your cursor to the very right or left of the thumbnail bar at the top, which will cause the bar to start scrolling.