Haven’t posted about blogging for a while, so here’s a huge one.

Despite a lot of talk about blogging in the classroom by many edublog-type sites, it is clear that the idea of actually assessing blogwork for assignments is still a new and evolving one. I personally haven’t really tried to go beyond looking at the blogs as a form of portfolio or journal to track the progress of a project.

Nonetheless, the web is hardly lacking in excellent student-written blogs, the type of which many teachers would like their own students to emulate. Here are a few:

• The best of Berkeley Blogs
• BBC – Essex Student Bloggers
• AustraLearn Student Bloggers
• The Write Weblog

Of course, the above blogs can also help to inspire teachers about the potential of student blogging. And after perhaps a “bad day” of student blogging, it’d also help to remind ourselves of the reasons why students should blog.

Finally, I can’t say I was surprised to read about this Blogger problem. I’ve actually had the experience of a difficult-to-explain blog link appearing on screen during a demo of Blogger to students, and I’ve been wary of it since. This, along with news of Blogger outages not too long ago, makes me really glad that I’d made the move to WordPress at the start of this year.