I've really been happy by student response to blogging in the Chaos and Fractals course (although I didn't start up the blog until late in the semester, with a resulting small number of student posts.)I've been thinking a lot about how to improve on this blog, and also wondering about other blogging opportunities for different classes - my own, and for other disciplines.
There's a wonderful blog devoted to Edublogs - blogs for education. Titled The Edublog Awards: Awards for scholarly and education focused bloggers the blog (managed by James Farmer ) has given out awards to the top edublogs - as voted on by educators.
Check out the 2005 Winners. The categories include
- Most innovative edublogging project, service or programme
- Best newcomer
- Most influential post, resource or presentation
- Best designed/most beautiful edublog
- Best library/librarian blog
- Best teacher blog
- Best audio and/or visual blog
- Best example/ case study of use of weblogs within teaching and learning
- Best group blog
- Best individual blog
There's enough here for anybody teaching from K-16 and beyond. Many of the sites have opened my eyes to different teaching and learning techniques, and blog designs that assist these techniques.
This is the second year of the Edublog Award blog, so you can check out last year's winners via the archives.
While you're at it, check out Incorporated Subversion, James Farmer's blog. Farmer is a designer, educator, writer and consultant living and working in Melbourne, Austra ...At his blog you'll see several of his initiatives, including free blogs for university students (uniblogs), educational blogs (edublogs), and social software and open source for education.
(Note: I got the idea for this post after reading a nice summary of the Edublog awards by Joyce Kasman Valenza in the Jan. 22, 2006 Phila. Inquirer)