Tips and Tools for the Classroom: Class Blogs

Common Core State Standards: 
Language
Writing
Instructional Strategies: 
Drafting
Prewriting
Reviewing

Using blogs in your classroom? Blogging with your students can be a great way of motivating reluctant writers, tracking ongoing progress in writing skills, and teaching students the basics of html and online etiquette. 

  • Learn more about the benefits of blogging with your students in our Tech Research Brief: Writing for the Web

As your students begin to develop their blogs, they'll likely want to add images and videos to spice up their writing. This is a terrific opportunity to introduce them to attributing the work of others, and adding basic code to their posts. Flickr is an excellent source of images licensed under Creative Commons, which typically means that you are free to use an image, as long as you attribute the author appropriately. Work with your students to find images they like using Flickr's advanced search feature for Creative Commons works. Help them find the licensing information for each image, and discuss what it means to share and attribute the work of others (see an example here). 

Once they've found images they like, they can either add the attribution in a caption, or use a cool tool like ImageCodr. ImageCodr generates the code needed to embed an image into your blog post that includes all of the relevant attribution information automatically. Using this code, you (or your students) can add images to your posts, and ensure that you're addressing the rights of the original creator of the content. 

Here's an example: 

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