Neil’s Blog

The results of your search…

Communication is good.  Blogs are good.  Parent-teacher blogs are useful.  These were relatively uniform opinions.  This was not a surprise to me.  I did find several useful postings though.

1.http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2008/08/increasing-teacher-parent-communication_15.html breaks down four different blogging sites.  From this information, and from my experience, I will stick with Edublogs.org.  However, I am still looking for a site that allows for free use of Feedblitz or some other email notification system for parents.

2.http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=736 gives several good pointers for setting up a classroom blog.

• Don’t simply cut and paste newsletters into your blog.  This will make the blog too long and parents won’t read that much
• Post more often.  Perhaps a subject each day.
• Use pictures.
• Add personal touches.
• Keep stats of how many visits you have (Google Analytics is one way).

3.http://www.slideshare.net/rbyrnetech/every-teacher-should-have-a-blog-corrected-presentation is a cute cartoon explaining the benefits of using a blog.  Basically, it says that parents will look at the blog rather than bother you.  Sign me up for that.

4.http://www.sometechsense.com/?p=99 talks about a blog more from a parents perspective.  This person strongly encourages teachers/schools to help parents set up their own Netvibes page so that they can monitor all of the blogs for their students’ teachers.

I am still searching for a way to easily (and freely) directly notify my parents of an update to the blog.

What you learned from performing this search.

As a default I went directly to Google to search for information on this topic.  I began by using Google Scholar, but I decided that I didn’t want research on this topic.  I wanted to hear directly from people using blogs in their classroom.  Therefore, I switched back to regular Google and searched for “parent teacher communication blogging” (minus the quotation marks).  The biggest flaw with my search method was that I only looked for information that cooraborated my thinking.  I did not search for any opinions that did not like blogs for classrooms.  I am sure they are out there, and I am sure I already know what they are going to say.  Everything I found supported what I was thinking.  I am very confident in my ability to seach for information on the Internet, so if I had to conduct this search again, I would use the exact same method (minus the detour into Google Scholar, which I simply think is really cool since it didn’t exist when I was in college before).