Edublogs

www.edublogs.org

Edublogs has been hosting a custom blogging platform for teachers, schools and students.  It has grown to be one of the largest and most trusted blogging site for teachers and students. 

Although I have not had much experience with Blogs, they strike me to as a great place to provide information for access anytime and anywhere, including social networking and interaction; and to have the ability to openly share thoughts and achievements.

Edublog is an easy access location to share documents, materials, and even downloads.  Anything that is posted is accessible by all students who have an account.   It facilitates online discussions through simple to use forums. 

More and more teachers are encouraging blogs for planning and reflecting on classess and projets.  Another popular way teachers and students are using Edublog is by making regular updates about assignments, events, and anything going on in class.  This keeps the student informed and extends the classroom to any place that has access to the internet. 

Edublogs is a great place to post group projects, ePortfolios, school newspapers, reflection journals, class websites, and much more!  One of the most powerful features of Edublogs is the ability for teachers to easily create and manage blogs for students.

Basic Competencies and Skills for Instructional Designers

http://en.wordpress.com/tag/instructional-design/ 

As the field of instructional design continues to rapidly change, ID are constantly looking for new ways to challenge our the learners. The Wordpress.com for Instructional Designers offers new ideas and tools to enhance online learning as well as other training modalities.  I have listed some of the topics that I read about in just a few days of postings. 

• Communication skills
• Project management skills
• Knowledge of Instructional Design models
• Technology skills
• Problem solving skills
• Decision making skills 

There was also an excellent posting about Measuring Success: Who Needs Business Results Anyway?  I think as Instructional Designers we all do, and our employers and customers expect it.  It states, “it is becoming more critical that learning and development professional communicate the value of their work throughout the organization.  

Do you need a job description for an Instructional Designer, well they have an excellent on on this site.  Interested?  Then, log on to this blog.

TeachersFirst.com

www.teachersfirst.com

TeachersFirst.com is a web resource created and maintained by teachers for teachers.  It provides collections of lessons and web resources.  It is designed to save time for teachers by providing “practical and user friendly classroom ready content along with thousands of reviewed web resources.”

It contains a collection of original content, internet resources, lessons plans, and tool drawn from around the world.  Each resource is selected and reviewed by one of their reviewers, all of who have classroom experience.    TeacherFirst  specifically focuses on tools and resources that can be used in teaching.  They provide content specific to subject or topics that relate to a classroom instruction.  This site does not include the type of information that someone can obtained free on the web.

One of the benefits of this site is the ability to search for lessons by subject, topic and/or by keyword.  In addition, it contains an Editor’s blog that provides continuous information that is beneficial to teachers.   This site will help me in my career if I have to design training for a lower level educated group.  For example, in my organization, we have a manufacturing plant that employs over 200 persons who have a 9 – 10 grade education.  They are excellent in their jobs, but when we are structuring training for the company, we always have to have special tools and  resources to assist them in learning.  This site will provide me with some of those resources.