Kidblog

Kidblog is designed for elementary and middle school and it's free and simple to set up. Teachers will notice the ease of creating and maintaining blogs if they have tried other blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress, which are not always easy for younger students. Kidblog
allows students to publish posts and participate in discussions within a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over student blogs.

For some extra fun, students who like to add images to their blog might want to try Speechable. This free online tool let’s them upload images and add speech bubbles to them.

Photo: Screenshot of a fifth grader's blog, courtesy of teacher Lee Kolbert, Florida.

Science Images Search

Searching the Internet for free science-related photos? Everystockphoto.com is a license-specific photo search engine. Currently it indexes and searches millions of freely licensed photos, from many sources, and presents them in an integrated search. Everystockphoto.com was launched in April 2006, and is owned and operated by Vibrant Software, located in Vancouver, Canada. Membership is free and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.

Everystockphoto.com aims to become a leading portal for the stock photography community, and will be adding features and increasing the index over time. You can keep up-to-date with the engine's progress in their blog. (Solar System Montage system image from NASA found on Everystockphoto.com)

Visual Media

In order to add graphics to this blog, I have signed up for so many accounts that there is no way I will remember them. Does anyone have suggestions for managing graphic online sources to use in blogs?

My daughter took this great photo. View more Oh Lenna photos at flickr.
Flickr is an excellent source for photography. You have to sign up for an account, but it's free. Once you're in the site, look for photos that have a "blog it" option above the photo. Clicking on that will generate a code that you can embed into your post. The photo will appear magically, sized to fit your blog space.

In my Internet searches for how students learn through technology, I came across this student web site. A team of eleven Forest Park High School, VA iT program media students, calling themselves The Millennials, created videos and web pages that were featured in a 2005 U.S. Department of Education presentation to Congress on the importance of using technology in the classroom. Their videos describe the digital generation, how they learn, and why schools should adapt to the way they learn.