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Blogs are easy to create. But just because something's easy doesn't mean it will stick. As someone who supports teachers in understanding and using digital learning tools, this is a pattern I've seen all too often. So how does a teacher or her students find blogging success? Here are a few things I've discovered in both my own blog as well as with my work with students and teachers.

Read Write Think offers a free program called the Profile Publisher. Profile Publisher allows students to create and print mock-ups of social network profiles. Students can create profiles for themselves of for fictional characters. Profile Publisher includes fields for "about me," "blog posts," "interests," and all of the other profile fields typically found on a social network. Completed profiles can be printed.

"Digital Storytelling can transform your students' writing into a visual masterpiece that is filled with voice and emotion, while enhancing critical thinking skills. The iPad takes digital storytelling to a new level by making the process easier, and even more engaging for students of all grade levels as well as for their teachers. "

"Preparing students for commenting with "wall blogging"."

y allowing students to bring their mobile devices to class, school districts provide the benefits of personalized instruction - without blowing their budgets. And they also pass on their purchasing power to families, who can buy devices from vendors at the district's discounted rate.

This is an amazing assignment! "One of our grade 7 Humanities teachers, Dan McWilliam, just finished a project with his grade 7 students. In order to understand the concept of perspective in historical accounts, Dan had his students re-write a 'picture book' on colonialization from an alternate perspective."

More and more special education teachers are finding that the implementation of "Wii Therapy" in their classrooms enables special needs students to break down barriers and develop skills they might not otherwise be able to learn.

The video is a great way to introduce kindergarten through third grade students to online safety.  I like how this video compares the online world with the real world.  This helps students understand the rules in a way that goes deeper than just following the rules because we say so.

This is written regarding post secondary students, but I think that it applies equally well to K-12.

"This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able."

 I believe "iFake Text" is a great example of  a simple tool that can allow your students to show what they know in a unique or novel way by emulating a text message conversation on an iPhone. Tammy Worcester

So often when we talk about schools, students, parents and teachers, we discuss things in arm-lengths type of way. We discuss how they need to have richer and more meaningful learning experiences, how we need to provide them with the opportunities to use the technological tools in authentic learning experiences. What we don't discuss is how schools need to be places of living not just of learning. They need to be places of community where children can experience life-lessons not just academic lessons. The story that follows is about one such event that took place at our school this past year.

"A free directory that connects teachers and helps them use Skype to enrich students' educational experience."

"Not every educator should be expected to use all of these technologies in the classroom, but every educator should understand what these are, the potential they have in the classroom, and how their students may already be using them. "

"Designed for students in Grade 7 and higher, the textED.ca website provides a fun, interactive platform for children to learn about the short-term costs and the long-term ramifications associated with texting."