For one of my classes I try to have the kids blog regularly. It’s a hard thing to do from a technical point of view. There are very few inexpensive or free sites where I can have the students write and yet maintain a bit of control over their writing in case they say something inappropriate. A lot of blog sites also require users to have an e-mail address. That’s less of an issue for me as a high school teacher, but it’s a real concern for elementary teachers.

I have used 21 Classes. It’s a nice site with fairly easy to figure out controls. When I first tried it out they let you sign up 50 students for free. That’s been cut back to 10 which isn’t terribly useful. For $8.95/month you can raise that to 100, but with classroom budgets under strain it’s not easy to find $89.50/year for blogging.

KidBlog seems to be a new and cool solution to the problem. For those who blog on other sites, it seems to run off a WordPress engine (which I like). From the teacher’s point of view, it allows you to create sttudents without them having to have e-mail. You can set it so student posts must be approved by you first, and you can even keep your whole blogging coummunity private  if you like.

KidBlog also allows you to set up multiple teachers/administrators on one account, and seems to have some way to link the kids to more than one class. This opens up room for collaboration between teachers and classes which could have interesting possibilities at the high school end of things.

As far as appearances go, KidBlog offers only two templates for personalizing your site. It’s not much, but this isn’t a crucial issue unless you’re hyper sensitive about their design choices.

KidBlog is free at this point and there’s no indication that any change is in the works. It looks like a pretty cool blogging platform that will satisfy almost any teacher, and almost any administrator.

I have to admit that I’m not a great fan of English as a subject. I never enjoyed it that much. That said, I recently came across two cool websites that can add a little fun into the subject.

National Punctuation Day is a website devoted to the love of punctuation. The day was celebrated on September 24, but it’s an annual celebration so start preparing now for next year. There’s suggestions about punctuation related activities including a punctuation baking contest.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks  features all kinds of pictures of signs where quotation marks were placed when they shouldn’t have been. The comments beside the pictures are intentionally witty (sometimes a tad risque) and might require a bit of explanation for the average student. Even so, it’s a good resource for pictures of quotes that should be where they are, and an opportunity for the kids to explain why.

In the wake of the new president’s swearing in last week, I stumbled across an Innauguration Speech Generator. It’s a kind of a cool little Mad Lib style activity where you fill in adjectives, nouns and verbs and it pops them into the appropriate places in an Obama style speech. As an English activity it’s lightweight and fun.

As a Social Studies activity this one is neat, too, because the Mad Lib template is fairly standard for a political speech. It would be fun to analyze it, throwing in your own verb and adjectives, etc, and then compare it to other politicians’ speeches. There’s likely a surprising similarity between them. A lot of rhetoric is thrown around but how much substance is there?

Interestingly, because of the domain (atom.com) hosting the speech generator, it’s blocked at my school. Hopefully it works better in your neighborhood.

Over the weekend I discovered Save the Words which is a site that asks you to save old, outdated words. Every year new dictionaries come out and drop older, little used words. Think of the treasures we’re losing.

To help the cause I adopted oporopolist and promised to use it whenever I can. For example: “After school I need to get some bananas on the way home so I should stop at the oporopolist.” They also included a funky certificate to commemorate my attempts to save this word.

Adopting words would be a great project for any class from the youngest to the oldest. Looking through many of the words I didn’t find any that were improper, though teachers should pay attention as kids will find ways to put normal words to rude uses.

It’s a great take on vocabulary building that you can turn into an entertaining and thoroughly goofy activity.

How meaningful is language? How meaningful is it when it’s combined with a picture? The Ad Generator explores these questions by taking pictures and captions from real ads and randomly putting them together. The really odd part about the exercise is that, considering everything is random, more often than not the picture and caption actually make sense together. If you’re looking at the power of word in English, Marketing or a Business course, this site would be worth a look.