Blogging for Home-School Communication Tools

Here are some links to pages with ideas on how to make your blog more secure.

Within Blogger
How to limit access to the blog:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42673&topic=12448
How to make the comment feature more school-friendly
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41443&topic=12456

Text for Newsletter Practice

I always have trouble coming up with text when I'm trying out some new things in Word, so here are some links to text that might inspire you to insert pictures and try out the tricks we'll cover. Just copy and paste into your document as you need text.

Teaching Quotes
http://www.netrox.net/~labush/teachqts.htm

How to Give a College Lecture
http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/course/thoughts/karp/karp.html

Thoughts on Learning
http://zia.hss.cmu.edu/miller/teaching/quotes.html

And if you already have your own text in mind, feel free to use it! I'm just not that creative on the spot.

Blogging for School-Home Communication

Here are some examples of schools and teachers using blogs to make school-home connections. Some are very elaborate, with pictures and videos posted. Some are simple, with just text. Some are updated quite often, and others are updated monthly or quarterly.

http://blogs.canby.k12.or.us/parkerj/category/Parent%20Communication

https://webapps.saugus.k12.ca.us/newsletters/_weblog/everyone.php

http://lewiselementary.org/

http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/blog/faussteacher/

http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337

http://blogs.oaisd.org/236

http://mrscowansclass.blogspot.com/

http://www.butlerville.net/1a/

http://mrsrsroom.blogspot.com/

http://www.oursaviorchurch.org/school/faculty/gthorp/

http://schimelnews.blogspot.com/

This particular blog is hosted by Blogger, which is a Google division. Get started at https://www.blogger.com/start

EduBlogs is another popular option. Get started at http://edublogs.org/
I've used EduBlogs with students, as it's designed with students in mind. Plus, you can customize the headers in some of the templates, which allows you to make it more personal for your school or class.

Most of the major blog services appear to have the same setups. For a breakdown of blog parts, check out these two sites:
http://www.hwyblogs.com/hiw-blog-parts.php
(a site designed by truckers, for truckers, I believe)

http://www.perrotlibrary.org/whatisablog.htm
(scroll down until you see a numbered blog page.)