Creating a Teacher Blog

In the Dark Ages, I created beautiful parent newsletters, with comics and illustrations. I usually used a ditto machine to print these works of art and a thermofax to copy my comics. I archived copies of the newsletters in a notebook. All this took hours. I am sure you can relate to my disappointment when we had our Friday before spring break desk clean-out party and found every newsletter, plus a few rotted lunches, in Billy’s desk. My well-meaning attempts at parent communication all too frequently fell flat. I know that you have experienced the same situation. One substitute that you might consider is a teacher blog. I did a teacher blog for my middle schoolers and the students were very enthusiastic! At the time I used Gaggle and Edublog to create the blogs but I prefer Blogspot in general. Blogspot is now accessible from your classroom (as well as your mobile device!) and is very user friendly. The best thing about Blogspot is that there are no special web skills required. The interface is very much like a word processor.— very handy for those of us who still are a little too comfortable with typewriters!

You can create a teacher blog for a couple of different purposes. One would be for parent communication. Weekly entries can keep parents up to date on what is happening in your classroom. Short videos and photographs of your students create interest and can increase parent participation. Blogging automatically creates an archive as well, so that you have at your fingertips every newsletter you have created. For those families that do not have internet access, you could certainly print off a paper newsletter from your parent blog.

I also used blogs in the classroom. I kept the student homework listed on my blog as well as important review information. Gaggle and Edublog have protected student blogs. These are great for allowing the students to create their own blogs and read each others. My students loved reading and commenting on each other’s blogs. If you want a Gaggle account, I have free access and can set you up. Otherwise Gaggle is $5.00 a month. Edublog is free and is similar to Wordpress is its layout. Both are easy for students to use. A teacher blog can be helpful in disseminating information to your students and their parents as well as providing an archive of information . Give it a whirl!