Using Blogs in Science Education

After almost two years of blogging (one with students) I’ve run across some fantastic add-ons for my blog. I thought I’d list the ones that I really like for those teachers just getting started.

Slideshare
Share powerpoints online and embed them into your blog (works just like youtube)

Google Docs
Create and share documents, spreedsheets, etc.

Box.net
Upload documents and link to them. When people link to your document they can either download it or just preview it (this is great if students don’t have the software to download the file).

Widgetbox
Want to add an Amazon booklist to your blog? Or a countdown? Widgetbox has a lot of fun widgets. You can even turn your blog into a widget (blidget) to include on another website (you can see my Extreme Biology blidget on the right sidebar).

Sitemeter
A great way to track your site visitors. I like to check referring sites to see how people have found my blog.

Clustrmaps
I don’t really find it useful for anything, but it provides a fun graphic of the location of your blog visitors. Edublogs just added it as a widget so it’s now super easy to add it if you use the edublogs service.

Technorati
This site lets you see when other people write about your blog or include you in their blogroll. It’s really useful for building connections.

Feedburner
Wonderful tool to track how many people subscribe to your blog. My favorite part is that you can make personalized feed signatures to include in your emails. Set up isn’t for the faint of heart so give yourself a Saturday to work on it.

Voicethread
Make your slideshows/videos interactive by adding voice and video comments. You can embed them directly into your blog.