msvrburton.edublogs.org
Thumbs up: Ms. B loves technology. That's evident. The first assignment I saw posted was to have her students go to voki.com and create a voki avatar who would speak a sentence using one of the vocabulary words assigned. This is so intriguing to me, because I could see myself using this exact assignment! The vocabulary program we use also has an online component, as hers seems to, so posting the lessons on my blog seems like a natural use! Ms. B is able to utilize a drop box of sorts to check her students' work, which would seem like a necessity as I feel my inbox would be inundated with the assignments of all 165 of my students at any time. How does she do it?
Thumbs down: The page seemed a little bit hard to navigate, and I'm sure she has to teach her students how to use the blog, although there are a few tutorials there to help them along. I was actually never quite sure where I was on the blog...
simsbumponablog.blogspot.com
Thumbs up: I found this to be the easiest of all the blogs to navigate, but I think that's probably because it is from blogspot... which is obviously with what I'm familiar. This blog also opened my eyes to the fact that not everything I post on my blog has to be educational... it can be fun, too. This teacher loves elephants, and posted cute videos of baby elephants from the Houston zoo every once in a while just to give his students something to enjoy! I can see myself doing that! There are loads of videos here on lots of language arts topics- I even emailed myself one of the videos so I can use it with my students next year. (Lots of things from teacher tube.com. Cool!) How did he get the cute background and side widgets? I didn't find anything of the sort on blogger...! Jealous.
Thumbs down: It would have been interesting if the teacher would have used the comments section for his students to respond to certain videos or lessons. He didn't.
blog0rama.edublogs.org
Thumbs up: I thoroughly enjoyed reading Mrs. Love's musings about the teaching profession, although this blog is not for posting assignments or even interacting with her students... although some of the comments on posts were from students. It seems her audience is adults- other teachers. Her commentary on teaching is awesome and insightful. She notes in one post that she hadn't updated the blog for a while because she was worried about the teaching blog harming her career, as it has to other teachers who have made the news. There is a video of Neil Gaiman on her sidebar which I think is a cool idea. She uses "tags" in her posts, too, which I'm going to try. One thing I LOVED on the blog was that Mrs. Love put her Shelfari book shelf as a widget. I just started my Shelfari, and I have a GoodReads account, which I need to look into putting somehow on my blog.
Thumbs down: I can't see myself writing for an audience other than my students, and I really have no interest in doing that. The pages on her blog, which seemed to be for the students, were titled "Drama0Rama," "Media0Rama," "Read0Rama," etc. On those pages there were simply links, which were not annotated, which I can imagine makes it time consuming to go through to find the link appropriate or useful for the students. These pages had no visual interest, and to be honest, the blog didn't have a lot of interesting things to look at or click on.
rumfordwriters.edublogs.org
Thumbs Up: This blog is interesting because the teacher, who is teaching in Qatar (!), posts the writing assignments on her blog, and her students write on their own blogs. On some of her posts, she linked/tagged particular students' blogs to point out things they'd done that she liked or to encourage her students to read one another's work. She had them doing really interesting assignments, too. I love the idea that the students are writing for an audience- a global audience! Some exemplar student work was posted on her blog, as well.
Thumbs down: How does she maintain all her students' blogs? Does she have them linked somehow to her own blog? I couldn't find that information. I was left with some questions and couldn't find the answers on the blog itself...
writeoutloud.edublogs.org
Thumbs up: I love the "tags" down the left-hand side which brought me to particular students' writings. The posts by the teacher were mostly assignments. She was sometimes "front-loading" them with information before starting a book or a poem, asking them to do some background research on the poet by bringing them to other sites. Some of the posts were formative assessments, as the teacher posted a writing assignment and the students would then post their answers in the "comment" section. The teacher would then thread her responses to their writings. The instructor also has a "mission statement" of sorts about the blog, which I really liked. It wasn't about her... it was about her class! It said "We are a group of students... We like... We care about ..." I love that! This teacher also had some videos which were "private" which I'm assuming she gave only her students permission to view, which can be important in student confidentiality issues.
Thumbs down: I didn't like how the "tags" were formatted, as they were jumbled together in no particular order and were all different sizes. I could see that it might be hard to find certain assignments as a student. I would much prefer them to be alphabetized or in monthly order or something. It also appeared that the blog had not been updated in some areas, which made some assignments and information a bit confusing.
I enjoyed this assignment, and can't wait to go back and visit some more of these sites to get more teaching and blogging ideas!
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