International Teachers Using Blogs

The first international blog website I found was about Rachel Boyd Nelson, a teacher in New Zealand. She teaches a year and a half class of 5 and 6 year old's. Her blog is interesting as it explain the classes recent activities. I like that she has links on the site that offers to read more about herself, a presentation on why she thinks students should blog, and much more. Even though her students are as young as 5 and 6, she still has them blog. I think its great that these young children are learning how to use computers and communicate through the web at such an early age. The link to this website is: http://www.blogger.com/profile/08772655279835157125




The second website I found about international teachers using blogs is about K. Lehman. She is a high school English, Creative Writing, and Multimedia teacher in Yagnon, Myanmar. Her blog discusses previous lessons she taught in class. She also posts assignments on her blog. To help her students with their writing, she has links they can click on grammer, punctuation, and spelling. The link to this website is: http://lovetowrite.typepad.com/msk/

Teachers using blogs in their classroom.

Teachers all over the country are using blogs. They are doing so to connect their classroom work with parents as well as interacting their students more through the web. Melanie Sullivan is a teacher in Needham, Massachusets and says she uses the blogs because parents like to know whats going on in the classroom. And the more the parents know about what she is trying to accomplish in the classroom, the less they will get upset. They parents also enjoy it because it allows them to hold conversations with their children about school.
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2006/09/07/teachers_take_bulletin_boards_online/

Mrs. Marisa L. Dudiak, a second grade teacher in Maryland, also uses blogs for her students. It is interesting because she teaches 2nd grade but is still able to use it. After her class returned from a field trip on a Native American farm, she had the students log into the class blog page. There the students were able to write about what they learned. This allows the students to be interactive with technology and lets the parents better understand what is going on at the fieldtrips. She says the students enjoy writing on the blog much more than in a typical journal. Teachers enjoy them because they are easy to sustain.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E5D7113FF93AA2575BC0A9629C8B63

After reading these articles, I think it makes a lot of sense for teachers to use blogs in their classroom. I feel like it is fun for the students and gets away from the repetitiveness of writing in a journal for assignments or using e-mail. It allows the whole class to interact with one another. Hopefully more teachers will learn about the benefits of blogs for their classrooms and use to to their advantage.

Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide (ACCESS)

Alabama Connecting Classroom, Educators and Students Statewide or ACCESS, provides classroom courses for teachers certified in Alabama through technology. Administrators and teachers all over Alabama are excited about ACCESS. According to the news release by the Press Register on July 10, 2008 all Mobile County high schools will have ACCESS. ACCESS basically offers students to take courses at another school that are not offered at theirs via internet. Among the opportunities ACCESS offers includes: additional course offering through multimedia, advanced placement courses, remediation and supplemental courses, multimedia and technology tools to promote instruction. ACCESS also provides teachers with videoconferencing tools.

Teachers go through a training process to learn how to use the material. ACCESS is also free for all students in the state of Alabama. Courses are taught during the regular school day and as soon as all high schools in Alabama have ACCESS in 2011, every school will have the same bell schedule to correspond with one another. I am not sure how useful it will be with physical education (my major) but it will definitely be valuable for all core subjects. I am excited to learn more about ACCESS and actually see it in person.