Classroom Blog Posting

[Theresa White]

I team-teach with another educator at our district high school in the Vocal Music program. We feel that we are pretty good at integrating technology (as much as possible!) into our program but want a better way to integrate writing with technology into the curriculum.

Our district takes advantage of a program called Blackboard to post assignments, class notes, create exams, etc. I have recently found a beta program named Studeous.com which seems to integrate a little more into that. I am interested if anyone has used either of these programs, or if you know of one that gives the opportunity to create classroom blogs/discussions, upload assignments, etc.

Any information is welcome and wanted! Thank you in advance for your help!

[Carol Broos]

I am working with another educator using Moodle. I just scratched the surface and will use it next year. I am interested in online learning as well. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Erinn Wrobel]

I've used Blackboard to post assignments, audio files, and classroom documents. I never had many users while teaching the elementary grades, so we did not get into discussions on Blackboard. This year I will most likely be teaching middle school students who will have more access to computers. My district has now switched from Blackboard to Sakai, a free open source program similar to Carol's Moodle, to save money. I look forward to utilizing the discussion features.

I have never used Studeous before. It looks as though it is all online as opposed to Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai, meaning that the district doesn't have to run the program or store data on its servers. As you noted, Studeous is still in beta and hasn't been up and running for an entire school year yet. If you go for Studeous, you may want to have your assignments posted on Blackboard just in case Studeous needs to go down for maintenance, or other first year bugs.

Keep us posted on whichever program you decide to use, and how you're using it. :)

[Evan Tobias]

Hi Theresa,

Musiced.net runs a free music education blog hosting service just for this type of situation. We run wordpress multi user on the system so it is very easy to set up one classroom blog with multiple users or multiple blogs for students. It is also very easy to password protect all of the posts to protect student privacy. You can sign up here

http://musiced.net/wp-signup.php

Information on setting things up here: http://musiced.net/blogging-setting-up-and-using-your-blog/

and to see it used in a classroom context - here's one used in a middle school for listening assignments set up by James Frankel: http://fams.musiced.net/

The system is very flexible and can be used in a wide variety of ways - Good luck!

[Dave Martin]

Hi, Teresa.

I just joined this site, so this is my first post...!

I was trained in blackboard and found it interesting but limiting. At this time, I am currently using a blogspot account, which displays inside an iFrame on my choir's site. There, I post news and info that might interest my students, along with notices for concerts, etc. I maintain a separate page of the site for Home Practice, where I upload recordings of me performing the voice parts in garageband for the kids to practice with, using a Java based player. You can check it out here:

www.taylorschools.net/west/chorus

You'll see I've disabled blog responses for the time being, but that can certainly be changed if it suits your style. Hope this helps.

Dave