Edublogging: My Favorites

Eduglog: An edublog is a blog written by someone with a stake in education. Examples might include blogs written by or for teachers, blogs maintained for the purpose of classroom instruction, or blogs written about educational policy. The collection of these blogs is called the edublogosphere by some, in keeping with the larger blogosphere, although that label is not necessarily universally agreed upon. Others refer to the community or collection of blogs and bloggers as the edusphere.

This is a post that I have been thinking about writing for some time now. It is really just an entry in which I want to chronicle some of my favorites in the Educational blogosphere. While I do not  now consider myself a newcomer to blogging anymore, there is still much that I want to learn in order for me to contribute more to the collective that is educational blogging.

I would like to put together a collection of Essential Edubloggers at some point to list who I read on an ongoing basis and who I think anyone would profit by reading their blogs. I think the best way to do this is to create a Wikipage to list who I read. Dr. Scott MclLeod's blog Dangerously Irrelevant  posted "Top 50 P-12 Edublogs - June 2008" and a subsequent post "Top 50? Edublogs? - Follow-up". While I believe that Scott has done an admirable job of rating many of the edubloggers into such a definitive list, my own list of Essential Bloggers will not attempt to rate, rather to list those that I have found useful on my journey.

Note:After writing this blog post I realized that everyone whom I have listed I got the opportunity to meet and get to know, very well in most cases at NECC 2008 in San Antonio, TX (Please read my earlier posts about NECC and Thoughts about NECC 2008). I was just amazed at "The Community of Edubloggers" that I got to meet and learn from, which is one of the many reasons I enjoy edublogging as much as I do.

I would be remiss if I didn't give a lot of credit to Vicki Davis and her Cool Cat Teacher Blog from whom I have learned much and have "borrowed" many ideas from. Her post, "Ten habits of bloggers that win!"is a must read, in my opinion. Vicki has a tremendous amount of helpful ideas on her blog, as well as many great tutorials she has contributed on the Atomic Learning website.  (If you don't have an account at Atomic Learning I would highly recommend that you do).  Vicki is also one of the nicest ladies I had the pleasure to meet at NECC 2008.

Darren Draper who blogs at Drape's Takes is really a nice guy I had the opportunity to meet at NECC 2008. Darren has worked on a series of articles on ethics and etiquette with respect to blogging and internet use, a very good series that everyone should read.

Wes Fryer and his blog Moving at the Speed of Creativity is one of the first blogs I check every days for updates.  Wes is probably one of the most prolific bloggers and always has interesting things to read about educational issues. Wes asked me to record the Ustream Feed of a session he presented at NECC 2008 about the K12 Online Conference 2008, The Magic of Digital: Collaborative Interaction in Teacher Professional Development.

Classrom 2.0 Ning reaches 10,00 members! July 24, 2008, Congratulations!
Steve Hargadonalways has some very interesting things to say on his blog. Steve created the Classroom 2.0 Ning which has recently added it's 10,000th member, Edublogger World and countless other great Ning sites. He also hosted Edubloggercon which I attended at NECC 2008 in San Antonio. Steve has created, in my opinion, some of the best Web 2.0 resources for educators.

Chris Lehmann who blogs at Practical Theoryis absolutely amazing. I recently wrote a blog post about Chris' post Effective School Technology Leadership. I ran across a podcast that Chris recorded at the Apple Learning Interchange about School 2.0 which is excellent.

Ewan Mcintosh from Edinburgh, Scotland who blogs at edu.blogs.com is probably the most eloquent bloggers out there. Ewan also has the best accent of all of the bloggers I have met. I also like that Ewan was suitably impressed with my one-month old grandson at the Bloggers' Cafe at NECC 2008 one afternoon!

Stephanie Sandifer who blogs at The Change Agency always has some interesting topics as well as a wonderful insight into educational issues. I met Stephanie at Edubloggercon 2008and immediately liked her. Stephanie presented "Marzano & Web 2.0" at NECC 2008 to an overflow crowd. She surprised me when she asked me share an example of my students work that I submitted to the Web 2.0 that Workscontest that won in the Cooperative Learning category!

While I realize that this list is not definitive, it is a compilation of who I enjoy reading the most. I will add to this list as this is a "work-in-progress" blog post. Please note that I chose to alphabetize these edubloggers rather than assign a numerical rank. Please, if I have not added your blog to this list please forgive me, but as I said in the introduction, this is meant to be a list of edubloggers that I read the most.