Dear Readers,
BlogAbroad.com Express time again. Has it really been two weeks? Yes it has, and our bloggers have been busier than ever.
This issue will focus on two things: Educational blogging partners and blogging communities. So strap yourselves in and get ready for the latest issue of the BlogAbroad.com Express.
As always, we hope you enjoy your ride aboard the BlogAbroad Express.
Sincerely,
The BlogAbroad.com Team (John, Drew, Matt & Kim)
The Educational Blogging Bandwagon
It seems like everyone is jumping on the Blogging bandwagon these days. While we didn't invent the idea of blogging, we brought the possibility of using blogs for educational purposes into the mainstream. Now, many schools and education publications are utilizing blogs, and we think it's fantastic.
Next Step Magazine is an excellent publication designed to ease high schools students' transition into college. They currently have four student bloggers (one from a private high school, two from a public high school, and one in college) chronicling their adventures as they either prepare for college or experience the first stressful year of it. The magazine says it perfectly when it comments that these students, "blog their way through high school and college life. It's almost like reading their diaries!"
As an example, one of the bloggers is a 17-year-old senior from a private Massachusetts high school. One of his posts is about his long-term girlfriend and whether they will stay together or break up when he goes away to college and she stays home. It's the kind of problem many high school seniors deal with. [I dealt with the exact same problem when I entered college. I would have loved to have been able to write or read a blog about it - Matt].
eSchoolNews is a major education publication with a newspaper, newsletter, and online news site. They have set up a massive blogging community of college educators who believe blogging is the wave of the educational future. They are obviously very bright people. There are eleven bloggers, all of whom are involved with education in some way or another. Many are professors, some are in charge of a department at a university, etc., and their blogs are all about how blogs can help education. They blog about blogs.
An example is Will Richardson, who is the Supervisor of Instructional Technology at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, New Jersey. He has a post stating that blogs should be, "Ed Tech Tool of the Year," and asks the question, "what new tool for the classroom out there has as much potential as Weblogs do?" He answers the question by explaining five ways that blogs can revolutionize the classroom experience.
Living Routes is an amazing program that gives students the experience of a lifetime. They send students to the most unusual of study abroad destinations, like Senegal, Africa, and place them in ecovillages where they experience life in a developing country first hand. They have set up a blog for their students to share their life changing experiences. The different links can be found at http://www.blogabroad.com/educationblogs.html. One post that is particularly interesting is from a student named Brad Davis who studied in India. He wrote how each day started out with a 6:15 yoga session amongst bamboo, neem, and rain trees. Sounds like an interesting class.
Pacific Village Institute is similar to Living Routes, except that they send high school students abroad. Again a link to the blogs can be found at http://www.blogabroad.com/educationblogs.html. If you think high schoolers are less interesting than college students you are sorely mistaken. One of the students actually met the Dalai Lama. Does it get any cooler than that?
We assure you there are plenty more educational blogs out there. These are just a few of the highlights. If you find any that interest you please let us know (Kim@BlogAbroad.com). But in the meantime, read up on some of the amazing experiences these kids are having. It might make you want to reevaluate you entire education.
Breaking Open the Blogosphere
Anyone who's been following the adventures of Phil, Jackie, and Emma knows the term "Mindsay" by now. Mindsay is the Blog Network that so graciously agreed to host our BlogAbroad bloggers. So what is a blog network, you may wonder....
A blog network is a community of people online who are sharing information through their blogs. This information could be personal, political, fictional, etc. Mindsay is one community, which allows everyone to blog for free. People can set up their blogs, customize their design, and be on their way to joining the fun quickly and easily.
Not all blogging communities are created the same, however, and there is a wide variation in the different things that different communities offer. One of the oldest and most well established of blogging communities is Blogger. Blogger is a service offered by Google (originally by Pyra) that allows you to create a profile and customize your blog. It is one of the more technical services.
Companies other than Google provide different services and one of the biggest providers is SixApart. SixApart provides two different paid services known as TypePad and MovableType. This allows people to create blogs that are either hosted on their computers or by SixApart depending on the service selected. SixApart also recently acquired a free service known as Live Journal that is another big community of bloggers.
Some of the other notable communities include Xanga, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360 (coming soon), and AOL Red. All of these services offer different benefits and therefore cater to different audiences. AOL Red, for instance, is designed for teens. Other communities tend to cater more to groups with certain interests. There are also social networking websites and blogrings designed to help those with similar blogs find each other. Friendster is one of the biggest social networking sites. There are also entire search engines dedicated to finding blogs such as Bloogz and BlogDigger.
When you take all the communities and blogs out there as a whole, that's what's known as the Blogosphere. Feel enlightened? Go explore. The Blogosphere is a fascinating place!
This is the fourth of many action packed newsletters detailing the adventures of Phil, Jackie, and Emma. We will continue to follow them as they explore the world. We will also continue providing useful information about studying abroad and blogging, as we feature different programs, provide answers to your questions, and more. Tell us what you would like to see in future issues of this newsletter.
