Blogs

When I first thought about creating a classroom website my mind didn’t go much beyond using it for teacher/parent communication.  However, I now see it as a way to provide students with endless opportunities to showcase their work and collaborate with peers on creative projects.  A classroom website is typically run through a blog where new posts can be added daily in the form of a “news” update, while still allowing individual pages with specific content.  It is on these separate pages that student work can be published and easily accessed by other students or family members.  (It should be noted that all blogs can be equipped with preferred privacy settings to ensure security for all students.) 

There are a number of fantastic blogging resources for teachers that don’t require any prior knowledge of website creation such as Blogger and Edublogs.  Edublogs is particularly helpful as they are setup to house individual student blogs within the main classroom blog.  This can be a way for students to post work to an online journal which can also act as a portfolio.  I think students would get excited about having a digital portfolio they could access from anywhere and that offers a sense of professionalism.  Student blogs have commenting capabilities and can therefore be used as a way for students to work together on a project or respond to a classmate’s assignment.  They can also function in the same fashion as a student/teacher dialogue journal.  Class websites are also the perfect place to post digital projects such as podcasts.  (This website is an example of what a class site could look like and was created with Blogger)