Blogging in the Classroom

Quentin D’Souza in his blog teachinghacks.com has some good posts on professional development resources.
This post about Video on Demand for Professional Development leads the way to a media rich website packed with curriculum based information organized by discipline and grade. The program created for Ontario Teachers does not require registration so any teacher can benefit.

Every member of Ontario Teachers Federation is invited to access in-depth professional development workshops from leading educational producers. There are hundreds of hours of Professional Development streaming video content available here. The programs will be available from early November 2007 to November 30th,2008.

There is no registration to access the materials at this time, although the registration process will be simple enough for any educator to access the content.

http://www.iriseducation.org/b2b/otffeo/

One can only speculate why this information is not more widely known to educators in Ontario, or promoted by other organizations under its umbrella. So spread the word!

Diane Carver at thecanadianteachers.com talks about how Centre d’Apprentissage du Haut-Madawaska uses a blog for its school website.

The C.A.H.M. weblog links to individual blogs kept by students, teachers, department heads and administrators to present a dynamic and up to date picture of the school. Each week, the school’s director uses feeds from classroom and student blogs to post an update of what’s going on in the school. The front page may include recognition of students or teachers, short summaries of classroom work that’s being done and information about upcoming events.(3)(4) The RSS feed makes it easy to pull in and format all the information, and the recognition encourages students and teachers to post their work, questions and information.