Preparing teachers to blog

I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. I have been spending a lot of time looking at Web 2.0 tools. The possibilities excite me as I read about the tools and their uses in schools. I follow link after link and discover so much good stuff! I am working on ways to introduce these tools to my fellow teachers. I have played around with blogging, and some different Wikis. I have worked with a few individual teachers on Web 2.0 tools. My focus is now how to pass it on to the faculty in general? The largest issue faced by teachers is the safety of their students. It is not the pedagogy of the tools that is in questions – most teachers I have spoken with embrace the possibilities with gusto. But they are brought up short by the “safety issues.” They want all the concerns address before they begin. Therefore one of my responsibilities is to find solutions to these concerns.

So I went to the source Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere, by David Warlick. Though I could find all the information on the Web there is something special about holding a book in your hands and mulling over the ideas. I needed this read it helped me refocus and put things in perspective. To introduce blogging I feel I will take a two pronged approach. First I will introduce the personal or professional blog, secondly the classroom blog. Both have different concerns, I was starting to get them all tangled up.

For the professional or personal blog I will focus on the tools Bloglines, Blogger and edublogs. I will also introduce RSS feeds and aggregators. Then expand that to the classroom here I will introduce Blogmeister. A blogging program created by David Warlick, part of the Landmark project, that address many of the safety concerns. More later on the concerns faced by each type of blog – personal and classroom. In the end I hope next school year to see more teachers and students joining the great conversation in the Blogosphere.