Group items tagged

Hotlist of school blogs.

Welcome! ClassChatter offers free blogging and web tools for teachers at all levels of education. Our first goal is to provide a safe haven for teachers and students on the web. You will find a secure and private environment, free of any advertising directed at your students. We hope that you will discover useful tools that will help move your students more rapidly into 21st century communications and collaboration!

Blogs for elem and middle school

"These blogs have everything you need for your ultimate teacher's toolbox."

WordPress plugin that converts all Joomla posts to WordPress posts.

Too lazy to learn SQL queries? No problem!

The Teacher Challenge is made up of free 30 day professional development challenges where participants are stepped through weekly tasks that increase their skills while working together as part of a global community. The Challenge is open to anyone who wants to increase their skills - blogs will be used for reflecting your progress while learning and connecting with each other. We've observed success of any use of online technology is strongly related to the teacher's abilities. The greater we support and increase a teacher's skills, the better they are able to support their students use of web 2.0 technologies.

Command of the written word is a vital 21st-century skill, even if we are using keys, buttons, and tablets instead of pens and pencils. In fact, in our digital world, communication is now more instantaneous than ever. How do we prepare our students to meet the challenge? Blogging can offer opportunities for students to develop their communications skills through meaningful writing experiences. Such projects not only motivate students to write, but motivate them to write well. Furthermore, student-blogging projects can be designed to address the Common Core State Standards for writing. For example, see anchor standard six, which calls upon students to use technology to "produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others." Score!

"Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix!" Check out the Amazing Fact Generator and The Ultimate Brain Challenge. Fun and engagement for students and adults alike, this site will help you instill a love of learning in your students.

BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you'd expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact. BuddyPress is built to bring people together. It works well to enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. Some of the fantastic uses might be: * A campus wide social network for your university, school or college. * An internal communication tool for your company. * A niche social network for your interest topic. * A focused social network for your new product.

Great blog about instructional coaches. I love the post about coaches being like plate spinners at the circus.

"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."

This was just shared in another group list. Thought many of the (former) CFF folks would also enjoy it.

Blogging Rubric sample

""Our research suggests a strong correlation between kids using technology and wider patterns of reading and writing," Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, told BBC News. "Engagement with online technology drives their enthusiasm for writing short stories, letters, song lyrics or diaries." "

Shared today on Twitter. Article from 2009

"You've completed your lessons for the day, but you still have some time left and a group of eager students with nothing productive to do. What can you do in this time to keep your class under control until the bell rings? Here is a list of 10 things to do when you only have 5 minutes left in class."

"If you're a teacher / administrator / librarian / education professor that somehow 'doesn't even realize [yet] that there's a decision to be made,' should you even be working in a school or university? Don't our children and our school systems need and deserve someone who's in a different place than you are? It's one thing to still be a learner; heck, we're all learners with this technology stuff. It's another to opt out or not even recognize the choice. If we look at what our kids need, shouldn't we replace you with someone else? "

Promethean Planet blog with handy dandy resources. Not a lot of 'em, mind you, but the ones that are here are pretty good.