It’s lunchtime here at EdCamp Boston, it has been a good morning of mingling, sharing, and learning. I facilitated a conversation about blogging. What I enjoy about EdCamp is that there isn’t a keynote speaker or any planned workshops. As a first time EdCamp conversation facilitator I enjoyed being able to let the conversation go wherever people wanted it to. I felt like this format could help more people have their needs met than a traditional workshop-style session.

The conversation I facilitated was titled Everything You’ve Wanted To Know About Blogging, But Haven’t Asked. About twenty people came to the conversation and we covered all kinds of topics related to blogging in the classroom and blogging for personal/ professional use. During the conversation I shared a couple of links with the group to address a couple of things that came up.

In response to some questions about teaching students to comment I brought up this page of posts from Silvia Tolisano. This page contains Silvia’s excellent blog posts about teaching students to write good blog post comments. You can watch one of the videos below.

3rd Grade- Quality Commenting on Blogs from langwitches on Vimeo.

In response to some questions about “selling” teachers on creating a classroom blog, Patrick Larkin and I brought up the idea of selling them on the practical benefits of blogging. To that end I put this Slideshare up on the screen.