Evaluating Educational Blogs

Blog that Works:
Kindergarten Tales
This is a blog for a Kindergarten class, created by two teachers who teach the class together. The teachers keep the layout of the blog season oriented, so right now it features birds, flowers and spring colors. The header is rather large, but it works for the theme of the blog. There is a lot of student work featured in the blog, which is exciting for students as well as parents to see. This blog provides ideas for learning outside of the classroom through other technology venues such as apps for iPads and iPods. Students helping and working with other students are featured in videos in this blog, and  there are numerous pictures of children doing activities in the classroom. There are even stories on the blog that children can go to and read just as if they were reading the actual book. The children are encouraged to make their own books using a website provided on the blog, and are then able to share them with their classmates.

Blog That Needs Work:
TEAM TOA-Shanghai American School, Pudong, Third Grade Blog
This is a blog for a third grade class, yet the amount of information crammed into the blog is overwhelming even to me as a college student. It looks like a fairly decent blog when first arriving at the page with a picture of the students in the class and only a few colors, but upon scrolling down, I couldn't handle all of the information being thrown at me. The fonts are all different sizes and colors, and there is so much information in the sidebars that your eyes never get a break. There are clocks on the left side of the page which display the "times around the world," which I don't feel is necessary in the first place, but the times are not even accurate. There are pictures showing students in the classroom which is nice, but they are all crammed together so that you don't really get a chance to see each individual photo. They are also all the same photo, the only difference being the student featured in it. I enjoy seeing pictures of what is going on in the classroom, but in this case, there needs to be a more vast assortment of activities going on in the pictures, and they need to be spread out throughout the blog a lot more. Overall this blog is just very overwhelming. It may have great information, but finding it and knowing what is important is very difficult.