The folks at Teaching Tips, who provide a fairly eclectic arrangement of resources and information for teachers, has just pasted 50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers.
Blogging is becoming more and more popular in the classroom. Teachers can blog to stay in touch with parents and students or they can incorporate blogs from all of the students as a learning tool. The beauty of the student blog is that children from Kindergarten to high school can blog. No matter how you use blogs in your classroom, these tools will help you get started, enhance your experience, or bring the students into the fun.
The categories include:
- Where to Create Your Blog,
- Blogging Tools and Help for Teachers,
- General Blog Tools,
- Blogging and Internet Safety, and
- Getting Students in on the Action
I was gratified to see Class Blogmeister at the head of the list, though I continue to worry about the increasing number of users — over 160,000 now. Users have noticed a buckling of the service over the past few days, which was a surprise, given that this is an off season for all of my services.
Working with the techs a Rackspace, who hosts my servers, we discovered that one of them was undergoing a “denial of service” attack. They blocked the attacker IP and set up monitors to guard against continued or future attacks. It seems that there are people out there who illegally install software on unprotected web sites that are designed to launch attacks against randomly selected servers. If they can break the server (which they were not able to do with CB), and they can do it consistently, then they will notify you, anonymously, and extort money in return for letting your server alone. Insidious.
Anyway, these 50 Usefuls are pretty comprehensive, and I look forward to scanning through them.
I think using blogs in classrooms today is a very important thing. With most young students on the Internet on a daily basis at home, why not introduce into the schools? Students can probably better communicate on the Web nowadays than any other way. Why not make it simpler and more interesting for them?
This is very helpful as I am starting to use blogging in the classroom. Thank you for posting these blogging tools.
Thanks for the source of information.