Award-Winning Teacher Blog

I reviewed "Mr. Foley's World of Words" for my blog review assignment. I was drawn to his blog because teaches 7th grade English, which is the area I'm interested in. 

Mr. Foley uses his blog as a tool that he can easily incorporate into his everyday classroom activities. When you first visit his blog, you are prompted to select your class, and then there are following instructions once you reach your page.

I clicked through a few of his classes and looked through them; he posts assignments and classroom activities in each of them. 

I opened some of the student's blogs to see what the content looks like. He has each student create their own blog, and that is where they can post their creative writing assignments and responses to assignments he posts on his own blog. I think this is a very helpful tool for keeping track of student's assignments because it keeps them all in one localized place. It also gives the students a chance to be creative, as they were allowed to use whatever blog layout they wanted and personalize it. I could see myself doing this in future classrooms. The only thing I had reservations about was actually managing multiple students' blogs-- it seems like it could become overwhelming to keep checking in on each student's blog. However, I'm assuming that he has a solution for this problem. Maybe there is a potential system that compiles all the students' responses without having to open each blog.

He also posts his classroom assignments and anything students might need extra copies of under a separate documents section. I think this is very helpful because that makes it the student's responsibility to keep track of their own assignments. This also reduces waste in the classroom, and it can help the students catch up from home if they were absent for that day of class. 

I like the idea of keeping a "Class News" link open like he created. Although he doesn't seem to have update his, I think this would be really helpful to keep track of due dates and/or exams. I think parents would really appreciate this feature as well. I might extend it a step further and link a class twitter account. I think twitter would be very helpful in terms of sending out small reminders concerning what the students should be studying for and upcoming due dates. 

Overall, I think Mr. Foley's blog was very interesting and definitely gives me some good ideas to use in my future classroom settings. His blog was very organized and user-friendly and wouldn't create confusion for the students. I think that using individual blogs for students would be really fun for the students and would make the classroom feel fun and interactive.