Blogging in the Classroom with Edublogs: How to set up, manage, and coordinate a classroom full of blogs. Presented by Greg Marget

How I use blogs I use a classroom blog as a way to share information of all kinds with students and parents. I also am able to receive input from students about anything that I post. The Crosswinds Orchestra Blog Students use their personal blogs to report their practice, reflections, musical goals, and as a platform to discuss or display their musical interests. Mikaela's Blog Louis’ Blog

Links to classroom blogs Teachers are using blogs for their students in every subject, at every grade level. Links on this page are to pages that have lots of classroom blog links on them, in all disciplines, across all grade levels. Edubloggers Classroom Blogs Support Blogging Wiki - Educational Blogs

One Blog or Many? The first question to answer is how many blogs do you really need? There are two ways to go: 1. Make one classroom blog and have students all contribute to it. 2. Give everyone their own blog.

One Blog or Many? One Blog Advantages Easy to set up, follow, and maintain Centralized Content Total Control User comfort level is generally high (little or no learning curve for students)

One Blog or Many? Multiple Blog Advantages Greater freedom of expression Increased levels of creativity Students create and control content Student's pride in ownership (you are giving these student's their very own website!) More technical knowledge to gain

Setting up Multiple Blogs - practical considerations What does your district support/allow? Privacy concerns - know your district policies Generating blogs, usernames, passwords google classroom Create pseudo accounts through Google* *You can use a G-mail account you set up to generate student accounts. When you add a “+” after your GMail username, you can add any text and all will come to you, but a server will see this as a “unique” address. For example if your gmail account is you can set up a student account at You can do this for however many students you need to.

Edublogs Edublogs is a site dedicated to blogging for educators and their students. The blogs here are not as public as the blogs on some alternate platforms. For example, a Google search on "Crossswinds Orchestra" will never bring up my edublogs site, which provides increased security and safety for my students. Edublogs is free. To get started with Edublogs, get an account: Edublogs.Edublogs

Support and Help for Edublogs Edublogs Help Section Edublogs Getting Started Edublogs How To Videos The EdubloggerThe Edublogger - Sue Waters’ excellent blog is a must!

Edublogs Supporter E dublogs is free, but it is highly advisable to upgrade to supporter level if you are using your blog in the classroom. Supporter level cost is $30 per year. Supporters get a much higher amount of upload space (5 GB instead of 20mb) Supporters can remove contextual ads from the body of their blog, and from student blogs Supporters have a host of widgets and features available.

Edublogs Campus Edublogs Campus is a premium service that allows you to set up and administer multiple blogs easily. If your school or district will be using blogging extensively, it is well worth checking into, but it is not cost effective to consider for a single classroom. Edublogs has a site where you can experiment with the tools available on the Edublogs Campus dashboard to try it out: Edublogs Campus Demo

Monitoring Your Blogs What is RSS? Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a must if you are going to be managing lots of student blogs. With RSS, you can subscribe to all of your students‘ blogs and blog comments, and monitor all of them from a single location -even from your homepage. Google Reader Bloglines Netvibes Pageflakes

Contact Me Feel free to contact me at any time if you have further questions or or even better, to share what you are doing with classroom blogging. Greg Marget (651) Or just contact me through the blog: Crosswinds Orchestra