Educational blogging is becoming quite common place. Teachers create and manage blogs to communicate ubiquitously with students and parents. With blogs, teachers can initiate online discussions or flip the classroom. Students sometimes have their own blogs to publish work they are doing in the classroom and build digital portfolios. Blogging promotes expression, reflection, and interaction and can be a powerful tool for learning.

Blogs facilitate communication that is multimodal. A post may contain text, images, podcasts, infographics, video, vokis, and hyperlinks. Blogs can have feeds from other social media sites like Twitter and Pinterest. A variety of widgets are available from calendars, visitor maps, to an overview of the latest comments. This has many implications for literacies education. Students must learn the following:

• To communicate effectively with a variety of media.
• To consider a live and potentially wide audience.
• To follow links responsibly.
• To differentiate between content in posts and extraneous information in the sidebar simultaneously calling their attention.
• To navigate through a blog archive.
• To be critical of authors and information.
• To leave quality comments that give feedback, add information, or initiate conversation.

When I taught third grade and used blogs with my students, one of my favorite educational blogs to follow or use as a model was Mrs. Yollis' Classroom Blog. In this blog you see students learning about literacies. They are learning to communicate effectively with pictures, videos, and text. The students are actively producing content that they share with the world. One of my favorite resources from Mrs. Yollis' class is their student-made video on how to leave quality comments. They give 5 tips for leaving blog comments that build on ideas and spark conversations. Their oral presentation effectively integrates speech and gestures that mimic a real newscast.

In close, educational blogging has gained popularity by proving to be a powerful tool for learning. It offers a wealth of opportunities for students to be active knowledge producers and to learn new literacies.