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"About a year and a half ago, a few of my colleagues and I had our students begin blogging about their independent reading. Some students finished four posts a year. Some students finished ten. Some more. Below are my top ten takeaways from our students' blogging experience."

Blogging for Kids | Make a Blog for Kids

What sort of rubric do you use for blogging? How do you have students blog for homework if they do not have access to the internet or a computer (in a poor, rural area)? To moderate or not who has the time? What can we do to increase readership? How can a student blogger attract more readers?

Love this idea of making visual prompts for all different subject areas...even better, having kids make them! How cool!

Elizabeth (Betsy) Bird, NYC public librarian, Newbery Award committee member, and book reviewer extraordinaire, writes prolific posts about new books, literacy programs, and the publishing world at her blog for the School Library Journal, A Fuse #8 Production. She is widely considered the most powerful blogger in kids' books.

"Transform your doc, pdf, word, movie in an interactive flipbook. It's very easy: upload your file and you will receive an email with the url to your creation. You can share this with your friend, family... by email, on your blog, on facebook or twitter"

"At its core, the six-word memoir teaches us to be concise but also introspective. Try describing yourself in six words. Not easy, right? So, for English teachers, the six-word memoir is a great way to get students to focus on getting a point across in as few words as possible. Students have to choose words precisely since they can't waste any. The six-word memoir teaches all of us writers a critical skill: words are valuable and have meaning -- don't waste them. "

"I was recently in a third grade classroom and was struck by the presence of rules that were posted for how to have a conversation. The poster said, "Each person must contribute to the discussion but take turns talking. Ask each other, 'Would you like to add to my idea?' or 'Can you tell us what you are thinking?' Ask questions so that you understand each other's ideas. Say, 'Can you tell me more about that?' or 'Can you say that in another way?'""

About five months ago, I posted about the possibility of using Goodreads.com in the classroom in a post titled Goodreads: Another Classroom Resource Possibility. Once you're on Goodreads, it's addictive, similar in social networking terms to things like Facebook and Myspace. However, Goodreads is focused solely around literature experiences. What I did was set up a private classroom group under my profile, and set up accounts for my students. I monitor their accounts closely because they're registered under e-mail accounts that I control in the classroom (I did this through epals.com, they offer free e-mail for classrooms that can be teacher monitored).

"The TeachingAuthors are six children's book authors with a wide range (and many years) of experience teaching writing to children, teens, and adults. Here, we share our unique perspective as writing teachers who are also working writers. Our regular features include writing exercises (our"Writing Workouts"), teaching tips, author interviews, book reviews, and more."