Last week ^[1] we examined how blogs are being used in the classroom as a part of the instructional process. This week I am going to inform you about a great list of education related blogs, and provide examples of some of these. I will also provide some insight into subscribing to blogs (for those who might not be familiar with the process) and links to a couple popular tools for educational blogging.

The “mother of all school related blog listings”
While researching this topic, I came across this excellent listing of “school bloggers” and after spending a fair amount of time with it, I realized it just made sense to use it as the main resource here:

http://supportblogging.com/Links+to+School+Bloggers ^[2].

This is by far the most exhaustive list of ”school bloggers” I have ever come across, listing hundreds of education related blogs, most of which seem to be pretty well maintained. While many of the blogs listed on this page are focused on technology in education, many are not. Be sure to look to the top, right side of the page where you’ll see a very useful Table of Contents that shows the groupings of blog types listed here, such as ”Blogs about Literacy”, “Teacher Blogs”, “Administrator Blogs”, etc. If you are interested in a specific topic, you can scan the list for it, or try using your browser’s Find function (Ctrl-F if you are using Internet Explorer) to search for specific text (for example, I searched for “higher ed” and “college” to find examples I was particularly interested in).

Examples of blogs in the higher education realm
As a member of an institution of higher education, I chose to provide a few examples of blogs specific to that realm. These blogs offer a variety of perspectives related to the higher education experience:

http://professorluongo.blogspot.com/ ^[3]: A good example of a teacher’s blog, by an instructor at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, NJ. A nice site with a couple posts a month about various topics related to teaching. There are links provided on the right hand side to some of the professor’s student’s blogs.

http://www.theother85percent.com/ ^[4]: A blog about “Working adults and the new world of higher education”, by Capella University Vice Chairman Michael Offerman.

http://mpbreflections.blogspot.com/ ^[5]: A blog about “21st Century Teaching and Learning”, by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, a college educator and an advocate for innovation in higher education. “Michelle has been the recipient of the 2007 Sloan-C Excellence in Online Teaching Award, the NISOD Award for Teaching Excellence and her innovations in teaching have been showcased in U.S. News and World Report.”

http://genderpopculture.blogspot.com/ ^[6]: Students enrolled in Gender & Popular Culture at The College of New Jersey are given assignments through this blog, and their blogs are all linked to this location. Each student’s blog, where s/he will examine his or her pop culture topic of choice, is the primary element of the course.

http://digitalparent.maremel.com/ ^[7]: A parent’s perspective - this parent is a college teacher, and a parent of teens/tweens.

Subscribing to Blogs
For those not already familiar with this … there are two common ways to do this - some blogs allow users to subscribe by simply entering their email address (and then confirming the validating email sent to them). The more common technique for subscribing to a blog is to subscribe to an RSS Feed. An RSS Feed directs the blog, or a summary and link to it, to a special place where you can go and view it (as opposed to having it go to your crowded email In Box). This link provides information you need to learn how to do this: http://email.about.com/cs/rss/a/rss_spam_free.htm ^[8]. While it may take a little investment in time to learn about this for first timers, once you are familiar with it you can easily use the process to subscribe to other blogs.

Some suggested sites where you can create your Education-specific Blog
There are many websites on the Internet where educators can write their own blogs. One way to do this is to become part of an organization that provides its members a place to blog, such as Educause ^[9], or Classroom 2.0 ^[10]. The other way to write your own blog is to set yourself up on one of the many sites that are designed to allow you to create your own domain or subdomain, where the content is entirely yours. While this may sound a little daunting to newbies, it really isn’t too hard to get started. Below I have listed two such sites, both of which are free, and are very widely used.

Edublogs.org ^[11] - This is a very popular blogging tool used by thousands of educators to create and host teacher and student blogs. It is easy to use, has a great deal of available functionality, and there are plenty of resources available to help you learn about using the tool.

Blogger.com ^[12] - This is an extremely popular free blogging site that is also easy to use. Any “blogspot.com” blogs you come across were created here.

Next?
That wraps up my two part series on blogging in education. As the month of June rolls out, I think I may do a multi part series on Virtual Worlds, specifically Second Life and Active Worlds, and how they are being used in education related applications today. Of course, I am always open to reader input, so if anyone has any topics they’d really like to see me look into, please let me know! Thanks.

^[13]