K-12 Online Conference: New Tools "Learn to Blog" "Blog to Learn"

I chose to listen to Anne Davis talk about blogging in the classroom because I feel like there is so much to learn about blogging and I think that student would really enjoy using a blogging program of some sort to learn. There are so many neat features to engage students and student can still portray a sense of their own character and personality in their work.

Throughout the course of this work shop conference I learned that there are a lot of different ways to teach students how to use blogging for educational purposes. I could set up a blog in my classroom where students could communicate with me or their classmates. They could read comments that other students have wrote about their projects and share their thinking with their peers.

I also learned that the new ideas, and the fun, creative environment that you create in your classroom can become a permalink, which means that posts made on the class blog can become permanent in the archives. The archives is also where I could post permanent blogs, like homework assignments or class calendars.

There was also a brief introduction to pod casting that was especially great for me, because it was simple to understand and just gave the basics about starting to podcast. In fact, this entire conference was intended to be for beginners to the world of blogging and was easy to follow and did not use any highly technical terms that people, like myself, who are easily intimidated and confused by new means of technology, could not understand.
Some of the characteristics that blogging seems to create in the classroom are students building anticipation to learn, joy, prompting wonder, nurturing learner, exploring the world around them and being involved.

Blogging is so easy to do and with the proper program can be a FREE, safe, and entertaining and engaging place for students and teachers to collaborate. With the more in tune to this technology I become, I really believe that I will incorporate this feature in my classroom. I think that it can be especially useful in lessons that require writing and reading. I also think it could be a fun feature to use in math and science because of what you can post in the archives for students to refer to. I would want to place links to websites that have interactive learning games associated with different lessons that students could play in their free time or use as review for a unit test, etc.

The link to this conference is http://k12online.wm.edu/learn.mov.

On the home page of this conference there is an additional link to How to use Blogmeister which I found very interesting and easy to use. On the comments that were made in regards to this conference, it also seems that it is a very popular program used by teachers for blogging in the classroom.