The Redback Project

Blogs and Blogging
What does it mean to educators? Are they just a literacy tool? Reflective tool? How can they benefit education?
Take a step back Suz… What is a blog?
A blog is a blend of weB and LOG (journal) – effectively an online journal, diary of thoughts, ideas, ramblings, ideology, comments on issues and much much more, from the mundane to the esoteric.
Who uses blogs – lots of people around the world, it is interesting to read the country by country breakdown the Blog Count as of July 2008 was 70 million, only 400,000 attributed to Australia, but the stats are questionable as they mention many Aussie blogs are hosted outside Australia. Whether they are active or informative is a different question, the bottom line is people feel they have a voice and a soapbox to share their thoughts.
I have several blogs, some used more than others… I intermittently blog on my myspace, I have a blogger blog, for personal ramblings – it’s good to vent – and an edublogs account with 3 linked education based blogs on that. ICT in the Classroom - my eLearning ramble (this is duplicated on my Global Teacher’s blog), ICTatEMC (which is this one - the home and backbone of the Redback project) and one is my Multimedia blog, which my MM students are linked to. I pose them questions, and they respond, some just answer the questions, others have been quite reflective. I have my year 10 Photography students write a blog on our Moodle space, just a reflection of their learning for the day/week, to get them to think about how and what they are learning, we have one session in the Media room, so are able to access the computers, the other sessions they write similar reflections into their visual diaries. Towards the end of the unit I am going to get them to reflect on the two different media for reflecting, and it will be interesting to see which they prefer.
Globalteachers is a Victorian based blog space which also offers student blog hosting, it is based on Wordpress, so is very very similar to Edublogs.

Blogs are really interesting to read, when I find ones that are relevant to my research or thoughts I make sure to tag them with del.icio.us, and now with diigo and spread the word with twitter. And save the RSS feed to my aggregator – I use google reader. I find I tend to use it more than the one in IE, which I was saving things to, but forgetting to go back and check.

Global Teachers is a blogging community created by the Victorian Education Channel and SLAV to support educators using this tool in their classrooms. There are some excellent resources and links to how blogs are already being used, not only in Victorian schools, but around the world.

At Edublogs you can explore some of Sue Waters helpful hints on how to start blogging and using Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies in your classroom at her blog The Edublogger

Here is a video on teachertube which takes you through how to create your blog.

Enjoy your journey into the world of blogging.