LBPSB 2nd Annual Educational Technology Institute

Living Out Loud! - Blogging in the classroom

Target Audience: All subjects - from Elementary to High School

Why have our students blog? Better yet, why blog ourselves? And how about this Twitter thing... I mean, 140 characters; really?

We've all seen pictures on the web of cute kittens or photos of what someone you hardly know ate last night. But what if when people looked up a name they came across something different? Something that contributed positively to their public profile?

We need to teach our students to harness the power of the Internet and make it work for them instead of against them.

Blogging is not only a simple and efficient way of building a positive online identity. By its very nature, it encourages reflection and, once you've realized that your work could easily be read by potentially hundreds if not thousands of people from around the world, it gives an extra incentive to be mindful about what you write as well as how well you write it! Not to mention the fact that it's much more motivating for students to take the time and effort to write for a larger audience than for just one teacher!

Then, there's Twitter. Just like High School, Twitter is what you make of it. If you chose to 'follow' celebrities and gossip sites, that's what you will get out of it. If you chose to participate in EdChats, 'follow' educators from around the world who think out loud by sharing their thoughts and the results of their trials and tribble-ations (Yes, that was a Star Trek reference... My bio states that I'm a geek, after all!), I promise that you can grow more as an educator in a few months than most of us have in the past five years! And once you've started to taste the potential of twitter, you are going to want to share it with your students. Guaranteed.

In this workshop, I will share my classroom blogging experiences, the workflow I have developed as well as strategies I have come up with regarding managing and grading my students' blog posts. We will explore how other educators are using both blogging and Twitter in their classrooms in inspiring ways. We will take some time to help you set up a blogging site and Twitter account as well as start you off with a list of fascinating people to 'follow'. And, hopefully, you will be inspired to learn, share and 'Live Out Loud' with your students!