January 6, 2009
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Best of the Education Blogs Easy to Find Online
By Elaine Larson, AIT’s Director of Education
The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. According to Technorati data, there are about 70,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers—people who write Weblogs—update their Weblogs regularly; there are about 700,000 posts daily, or about 29,100 blog updates an hour.
Weblogs dedicated to education and technology for teaching are proliferating, and there are scores of outstanding blogs. If you haven’t entered this blogging realm yet, grab a cup of coffee and dive in. Some recent “finds” in this trend are described here. These blogs provide opportunities for discussion of issues, compiling of news about education trends, links to a wealth of valuable Web resources, and practical ideas for teaching. Topics are far ranging—from education in general to the use of blogs themselves as teaching tools.
A note on the evaluation of education blogs: As with all other resources, especially new Web resources and innovations, blogs should be read with a critical eye. Some highly regarded education blogs are cited below—blogs that win awards, are authored by educators with outstanding credentials, and get cited positively by those “in the know.” But blogs are mostly still opinion pieces. The democratic nature of blogging, however, is that every post by the blog author is open for discussion. Sometimes that discussion challenges the opinions of the author; sometimes it affirms them. At the very least, education blogs foster the sort of open discussion of education issues that educators agree is essential. This is probably the best outcome of the blogging experience.
Before that, however, we offer some basic information about Weblogs—the “what” and “how” of them. Although this information isn’t new, it’s still current and relevant to blogging today.