An important part of your personal learning network is finding the time and tool to reflect. A blog is the tool that most educators use to reflect on their practice, their profession, and their interests. If you are one of my students, the blog is the most integral part of your PLN for my course. It will contain your reflection, examples of your work, and links to all of your other tools. Think about it as the central hub of your PLN. As far as tools go, there are many blogging platforms that work very well for this function. I am most familiar with Blogger, Google's blogging platform. It is easy to use and, as you will already have a Google account, you can use the same user name and password for Blogger. Some other great blogging platforms are: Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous Spaces, and Edublogs. I will mainly discuss Blogger in class, but the main idea is to use the blog to reflect and share, so the tool isn't the most important thing. However, if you are a student who may need some support from me, I would strongly recommend Blogger.
Blogger is the platform I use most frequently. They have greatly improved the look and feel of the blogs, so I guess I am a creature of habit. . .but I am willing to try others. . .maybe.
Tumblr is a very cool way to blog. I see many bloggers using this tool. It is really easy to set up to post to. I have my Tumblr account linked on Scoop.it so when I post something to Scoop.it, it also goes to my Tumblr blog. I haven't really used it too much, but I like the way it looks.
Wordpress is probably the second most popular platform besides Blogger. They have clean looks and are just as easy as other platforms. The reason I don't use them is that the free version does not allow my to embed videos and other content in a post, I can only add a link.
Posterous is another platform that produces visually cool blogs. They now have Posterous Spaces. I have an account, but haven't used it much.
Edublogs is another blogging tool that is very educator friendly. I didn't find it as easy to navigate as the other tools, but I like some of the layouts I have seen. They also allowed for tabs way before Blogger ever did. . .I feature that I can no longer live without.
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