At the beginning of Feb I wrote about “8 Ways to find great edublogs“. Since then I’ve come across many more useful links so I thought I’d reorganize my original post a little to make it more user friendly for those starting to look at Edublogs. One things I forgot to say in the original is “what is an Edublog?” Well wikipedia describes an edublog as, “a blog written by someone with a stake in education.”
Wikipedia goes on to say, “Examples might include blogs written by or for teachers, blogs maintained for the purpose of classroom instruction, or blogs written about educational policy. The collection of these blogs is called the edublogosphere by some, in keeping with the larger blogosphere, although that label is not necessarily universally agreed upon. Others refer to the community or collection of blogs and bloggers as the edusphere.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edublog)
OK, so here are some ways to find great edublogs:
A Starting Place
1) Ask friends/colleagues with an interest in education if they blog, and if they do read their blogs.
2) Ask friends/colleagues which edublogs they recommend, and read those.
3) Look on the blog rolls of edublogs you already read to see which blogs they suggest. If you like they stuff they write, chances are they also read blogs you’ll like.
4) Note other edublogs mentioned in those you already read. You might find an edublogger you would never have found otherwise.
The Great and the Good
Here are some sites listing top edubloggers:
5) The Edublogs awards have been awarded since 2004. It was an honour to be nominated in 2005 for some research I did with my colleague Lyn Boddington at Lincoln University.
6) Dangerously Irrelevant did a posting on the Top 50 P-12 Edublogs? – June 2008 using Technorati’s Authority and Ranking data.
7) OEDB did a list of the top 100 edublogs at the end of 2006. A little old now but I recognise many of the blogs as still being current and great blogs.
8 ) Edutopia did a Top 10 in 2007, not scientifically drawn up but still some good edublogs there.
9) Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer did a list in Jan 2009 of the 50 Top Education Blogs based on their engagement over the past 30 days.
10) 25 EduBlogs You Simply Don’t Want to Miss! by ZaidLearn, is in a different format on Slideshare
11) Outstanding Edublogs is another personal collection with some blogs I follow in the list. This one is presented via Clipmarks
12) Yearly Roundup – The 20 best edublog posts of 2006 is a slightly different approach listing top posts rather than top blogs, but it will still point you to some great edublogs.
Edublog Directories
These provide a list of edublogs, often self nominated, but still worthy of a look. You could add your own blog perhaps?
14) Kiwiedubloggers
15) International Edubloggers Directory
16) UK & Ireland EduBloggers Directory
18) Teacher Lingo
Search Engines & Indices
19) Edublogs is a Google Beta Custom Search created by Stephen Downs, whose edublog you probably want to add to your list.
The following are blog search engines rather than edublog search engines but you will still find edublogs listed just add edublog or education or school or K12 (you get the idea) to you search term(s)
20) Blogarama
21) Blogdigger
22) Bloglines
23) Blogsearchengine
24) Eatonweb
25) Feedster
26) Globe of blogs
27) Search4blogs
28) Syndic8
29) Technorati
Tools of the Trade
You’ll need some tools to help you, so here are some to get you started.
30) Jane Hart of Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT) has a great list of Top Blogging Tools
Once you have a list of 10 or more sites you are going to need a feed reader. This picks up the RSS feed (really simple syndication) from each blog and enables you to read them all in one place. A great time saver, plus you don’t have to go the the blog’s URI only to find there is nothing new posted. Here are some suggestions:
31) Feedreader I started with this one. It is downloaded on to your PC and is great if you only use one machine.
32) Bloglines I moved to this service as it is web based (for Mac and PC) so I could read blogs at work and at home and Bloglines knew what I had read no matter which machine I was on.
33) Google Reader I use this currently as part of my iGoogle page. Also web based.
34) Mac users can find a list of feed readers here
Create your own Edublog
After reading some edublogs perhaps you want to start your own, here are some places to get hosted for free
35) My post back in November – Slides – Blogging. What is it? How do you do it? What does it have to do with learning & teaching? lists some free blog hosts on slide 11. My top three suggestions are:
36) Edublogs – teacher and student blogs service specifically for education
37) Blogger very easy service to start with, I started here before moving to my own WordPress blog on my own domain
38) WordPress‘s hosted service
So what would you add??????
Image: Bluff Sign Post by Rob Young
