Dr. Siri Anderson, a social studies teacher at West Jr. High here in the Hopkins School District, is doing some great things will blogs in her geography and history classes. Her blogs World Geography Times and History Happenings are a great example of using the weblog medium to communicate class activities and provide a place to collect student writing.

Dr. Anderson’s students are doing some great writing as they journal about the Civil War in history class and take on the leadership of a country in geography class. Cool stuff.

In less than one day this blog was discovered by Will R. over at a really interesting weblog called Weblogg-ed.com. Fewer than 24 hours have passed, and this work has become part of the larger community of people who are interested in using blogs in education.

If you have a hobby or professional interest there’s probably someone blogging about it somewhere. Are you into jazz? Try The New Jazz Thing – Vince Outlaw’s Weblog. Are you into cooking? How about the Cooking In Color blog? I could go on and on. One of the best ways to get started thinking about blogging is to start reading blogs. Try the blog directory at blogarama.com to get started. When you get tired of checking all those Web sites daily, we’ll talk about RSS aggregators.

Imagine having a Web-based writing system that any person could use without knowing any HTML. Imagine having your students getting instant feedback from their peers as they develop a writing assignment. Imagine communicating with your students’ parents or the larger community by sending an email and having it displayed on your Web page. Imagine your students developing a group project and gathering information and feedback from others around the world and having their final product published on the Internet.

All these things are not only possible, but easy using any of a number of popular blogging products. What’s blogging? The term “blog” was formed by shortening “web log.” A blog is an online journal that may be password-protected to restrict access or open to the world. Blogging has been around for a few years now, but has recently reached the point where even non-techies are becoming aware of the medium. I believe the time is right to exploit the power of blogs to accomplish our educational objectives.

I won’t go into a lengthy list of potential uses of blogs in education beyond what I’ve written already. Instead, I encourage you to have a look at the following Web Tools Newsletter. In it you’ll find many links to thought-provoking articles about the use of blogs in education.

So how could we use blogs to accomplish the HITS? How would blogging by teachers improve their communcation with students and parents? How would you use a blog? Leave a comment. Let’s discuss it.