Our classroom has really been cooking up something special with our blogging. Last Friday, I posted a podcast that indicated we had been visited by 38 countries. By Monday morning, that number was up to 47!!
We keep a record of these countries by printing out and adding a 4 x 6 flag representation to the world map that hangs right outside our intermediate office. We want to thank you all for visiting and leaving comments, and Walmart wants to thank you because their sales of printer ink cartridges has increased since we began adding those flags to our blog back in February! =-)
The Blog Challenge 09 for this week is to add 10 new blogs to our blog roll and to separate our blog roll into at least two categories. This is a recipe that we can certainly follow.
We have a specific category for the Blogging Challenge09. Here you will find Mrs. Wyatt’s blog, Technology in Our Classroom. As we make connections with other classrooms, we are adding them under the category, Blogs We LOVE to Visit. We do have our favorites and are trying right now to connect with Room 8@Melville. The teacher posted a comment that they had never heard of Peeps!! We want to ship them some Peeps, so we are hoping to receive a mailing address through email to me at [email protected] in time for Easter.
Something that has really helped my students when visiting blogs is adding a description for each link. When students put their cursor on top of the link, a description of what kind of content, location, and grade level of the blog appears. I also like this feature because it minimizes my search time when I am trying to locate a specific post.
We are going to clean up our sidebar by listing fewer comments and posts. We are also going to clarify the category, Favorite Connections, by changing it to Hometown Connections. These links are to blogs with authors within our district. My students will be adding more blogs to this category very soon because now others teachers on our campus are wanting to know, “What is going on with this blogging?”, and, “How do we get involved?”
Quite a good recipe for the integration of technology applications, don’t you think?
Other students acknowledge them by name now. They possess an ownership for their learning and a confidence that they did not have before blogging. Parents are beginning to post in reply to their child’s posts and have subscribed to our blog. The process of blogging has brought a closeness between school and community, and more importantly, between child and parent. 
How do 
