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Sharing Educational Content Using a Blog
by Jim Hollis

Have you ever been so excited about getting information that you jump out of bed, fire up your favorite Internet browser, and click on your favorite Bookmark. I'm like this any time the Chicago Cubs are in 1st place. Fortunately for me this doesn't happen too often so I'm rarely caught sitting in my underwear looking at baseball stats first thing in the morning. (If you're going for the visual here, I have Spongebob boxers on and a white T.)

Getting excited about information is a good thing! This is intrinsic motivation at its best and so many people have re-discovered their love of learning through the Internet! This includes kids!!!  Two key factors in charging up that intrinsic motivation are (1) deciding "what" you want to learn about, and (2) deciding "when" you want to learn it. Each of these factors can be increased using the Internet.

Sometimes you can be very motivated for learning about something "right now" but you don't know what it is you're looking for. This is where websites like StumbleUpon can become very addicting. (Definitely check it out if you're not familiar with it.)

Sometimes you know "what" type of information you want (Cubs stats) but don't know when you'll be able to get to it. This is why RSS readers like Google Reader are such a wonderful (and irreplaceable) tool. (If you don't use an RSS reader yet, please take the time to become familiar with what it does. The coolest description of RSS is provided by the video RSS in Plain English produced by the people at Common Craft.)

How does this apply to education? Well, motivation is a key ingredient in learning and we, as educators, should do whatever we can to try to increase intrinsic motivation in learning. If we acknowledge that choosing "what" we want to learn and "when" we want to learn it are two factors that increase intrinsic motivation, what can we do to increase the positive influence of these two factors in the classroom?

To increase the "what" factor, educators need to create a more student-centered environment where the students have more control of what they're doing. To increase the "when" factor, educators need to make classroom information including notes, lectures, student work-in-progress, answers to questions, etc. available 24/7.

Over the last month, I've been introducing concepts of how to create this type of classroom information so it can be shared over the Internet and available to students at any time of the day or night. I would now like to show you "how" you take your new content (presentations, documents, videos, screencasts, etc) and make it available to your students all the time.

The most important thing about sharing information on the Internet is that it has to be easy. If it takes more than a few minutes to get new information on the Internet, teachers will not do it. This is not a knock on teachers. Quite the opposite. I've been a teacher for 8 years and I can say without hesitation that being a good teacher is the most challenging and time-consuming job in the world (sorry brain surgeons, but you've never managed a group of 30 teenagers for six hours a day, 180 days a year).

The first tool I will introduce for sharing information is a blog. Let's take a look at another great video from Common Craft called "Blogs in Plain English."



Now let's take a look at a few teacher blogs sent to me by my Twitter network:

• Woodster's Blog - This one's great. Notice the assignments on the left and the student blog links on the right.
• Drexler Dialogs - A simple but wonderful example of a blog created by a 3rd grade teacher
  
• Mrs. Cassidy's Classroom Blog - Have fun exploring this blog!
• Witman's Wisdom - Check out the comment sections of the blog posts to see where the real learning is taking place!

Educators can create blogs to share any type of information. For example, I maintain a blog called "Teachers Love SMART Boards" as a way to share information about using a SMART Board interactive whiteboard in the classroom. Currently, I have over 650 people who subscribe to my blog using an RSS reader. (My last post had a link to a fun logic game called Blobs which works great on an interactive whiteboard.)

I'll stop here to let everyone explore a little. My next post will take you through the process of creating your own blog using Blogger. If you want to get started before that, you can check out an introduction to Blogger here.

Feel free to leave a comment. Leaving comments is a great way to share and exchange information!!!

Sharing is Caring!