International Blogging

I found it more difficult to find information on international blogging than I did here in the U.S. This made no sense to me until I realized that all of the search engines I was using were U.S. based. So I began typing co.uk and ran across a few.

The first article I stumbled upon was Blogs in the classroom . This article addressed both U.S. and international school blogging. Clarence Fisher , a middle-school teacher in Canada, uses blogging for his class to respond to things ranging from classroom assignments to their weekend plans. One point that I wondered about was how do these get screened? Fisher reviews each entry before posting. Of course this does mean that yet another duty or task will be added on to the teachers day. However, Fisher points out that this is a task he is willing to do because he feels that blogging "sparks students' enthusiasm for computers, writing and opining." Fisher also points out that he feels this online journaling is giving his students the idea that they have a voice and it is being heard.




The second article I found was entitled Classroom 2.0 "Sustained Blogging in the Classroom" . This was a strange website since it really just gave me tons of links to follow Jeff Utecht, an international teacher in Shanghai, China.



I followed the links on this website and found tons of useful information regarding blogging in the classroom. Some links lead me to photo galleries , a final thought video from the '08 conference and of course the link to UtechTips . This is Jeff Utecht's website that he considers to be "a view of education for international educators." The amount of useful information I found linked to this one teacher was astronomical. Following is a link to the audio version of the Learning 2.0 Conference. Although it is lengthy, approximately 23 minutes, I still recommend listening to it in it's entirety. As a final note I would also like to share this video I found on UtechTips : .