Using+other+people's+blogs

=Using other people’s blogs in class=

For ideas on starting up your own class blog, click here. There are really two different approaches that can be taken in incorporating blogs written by other people into your class:

First, you can find appropriate and relevant blogs yourself, and assign them as reading for students. You can then have students respond with their thoughts, either in class, as a writing assignment, or in comments on the blog itself. This last allows students to interact with the author and readers of blogs and potentially dig deeper into the material in that way.

Secondly, you can assign students to find a relevant blog, or specifically a blog post, themselves. They can then share that post with the rest of the class, who can also read it and discuss it. This sort of assignment sets up perfectly to use with Google Reader (reader.google.com).* Have each student set up a Google Account if they don’t already have one (they should be able to use their Baldwin email addresses to set it up). Distribute a list of everyone’s Google Account email address, so that everyone can add the whole class to the list of people they share items with. When a student finds an interesting blog post, after adding that blog to her subscriptions, she can share the post so that the entire class can see it.


 * Google Reader is a tool that makes reading blogs easier – you can enter the address of any blogs that you enjoy reading (this is called adding a subscription), and Google Reader will automatically determine whenever a new post has been made on each blog you have subscribed to and will grab a copy of that post for you to read without having to go to the site. In addition, as noted above, you can share interesting posts with your friends. A few blogs will only allow a portion of each post to be “grabbed,” meaning that you can read a portion of the post, but will still have to open the blog (which you can do straight from the Google Reader page) in order to read the full post. See [|this page] for more information.