ning.com

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing for summer school and I decided I wanted to integrate more technology into my classroom. I teach US Government and have always had students read and comment on articles about government and politics. Since we have access to laptops in summer school I decided that it would be great to let kids create blogs on these articles. I found a site, NING.COM that is made for teachers. The site is a blogging site designed specifically for teachers. it has the security and privacy tools that are needed in a school atmosphere. At the same time it allows students and teacher’s freedom to create their own blogging profiles, pages, names etc. It is easy to navigate through and setup. I possess average computing skills and I had no trouble. This website and websites like it will be of great value to educators. I used it for an hour this afternoon and I had 28 kids completely on task. They were so focused that I hardly heard a word out of them. The only negative I can find, and it is a very small negative, would be that you must have access to a computer for each kid to use this site effectively. I highly recommend this site to to other teachers. This is a way to get all kids involved in your discussions. The shy kids (the ones who NEVER join in class discussions were actually some of the most creative and most frequent bloggers.