Blogging for Teachers

Blogsjuly16

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Twitter for Educators

Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange answers to a simple question. What are you doing? Where's the next workshop? Twitter has become a popular microblogging tool. It can be accessed a variety of ways, such as via the web or instant messaging services. Why is it useful for educators? Consider these possibilities:

1. Quick networking: Your one question may draw responses from a host of people quickly. If you have a relatively good number of fellow educators in your contact base, some of them are bound to be checking their twitterfeed when you pose your query.

2. Knowledge sharing: People are eager to answer questions because they can also learn from the shared experience. It's a quick way to find a URL to a classroom activity or information about an educational event, for example.

3. Track conferences: Twitter can help you stay on top of what's going on at conferences. If you can't attend one, someone may be tweeting about a session. Or, as often happens, you are at a conference but several great sessions are happening concurrently. A tweeter buddy can fill you in. To avoid multitasking during an important presentation, you can can check the conference tweeterfeeds later.

For more information and information, check out check out Twitter Fan Wiki. For a twitter application database rating, see twtbase.

Blogging Books

With this fifth post, I am completing all the technical blog tasks of my UFL online course. I'd like to recommend some books that teach basics about blogging and how to use a blog in an educationional setting (we used the first book in the list below for our UFL online course):

• Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson (Corwin Press, 2006)
• Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere by David Warlick (Lulu.com, 2005)
• Blogging For Dummies by Brad Hill (For Dummies, 2006)
• No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog by Margaret Mason (Peachpit Press; 1st edition, 2006)

All are available on Amazon.com but I haven't hyperlinked the book titles to the commercial site since they're not paying me for clicks. Better still, support your local bookstore or library and find the books there. Anyone have other suggestions for good books about basic blogging or educational blogging?

Thanks to the visitor who provided a link to an article about adding bullets to my book list (see comments to this post).
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