Blogging

**Articles on Blogging in the Classroom ** **﻿ ** Digital Discussion: Taking Your Class to the Internet By: Helena Echlin  The author of this article offers five different ways to incoporate a blog into the classroom. She suggests that blogs could be used in the following ways: Classroom Management, Learning Journal, Online Notebook, Class Discussion, and Personal Expression. I am not very inclined to start using my blog for classroom management or class discussion, as I feel that Edmodo offers a forum in which to do that in an improved manner. I did like the authors view on how to use the blog as a possible learning journal and for personal expression. The main purpose of my blog is to communicate with parents, however, I believe that adding these two elements to the blog would make it a more enriching experience for both the students and the parents. The blog can be a useful tool for parents to see their children's work, as well as for students to reflect in a mature manner knowing that their parents and friend's parents will be reading their work. Blogging? It's Elementary, My Dear Watson! By: Lorrie Jackson I enjoyed this article because it related blogging to elementary kids and how we can use it our classrooms. It goes through some ways to protect kids from possible blogging pitfalls and dangers. The author mentions how anecdotal evidence shows that children writing improves overall when they know that their piece is going to be published online for all to read. This struck me as funny because, while I knew this before, the students in my class just learned a very similar lesson when they had to read their journal entries aloud. There were a lot of last minute revisions in order to impress their classmates. I can only imagine what they will do with their writing when they find out that some pieces will be posted to our class blog. Twenty Reasons Why Students Should Blog By: Anne Mirtschin I enjoyed this article because it simply listed off twenty reasons why students should blog with a little explanation for each reason. The top two reasons that I found appealing were numbers eight and nine on the list. Reason number eight states that "Blogs allow text, multimedia, widgets, audio and images – all items that digital natives want to use." As I think to my students' writing and compare it to how their minds work, I feel that there is a disconnect. Black and white text on a page is no longer the norm, it is no longer how kids think. It isn't even how we think anymore! Internet websites, billboards, even newspapers and magazines are all chalk-full of pictures, embedded links, and movies. Blogs offer a medium for students' to supplement their work with visuals that relate to their topic to make their piece of work more appealing. Reason number nine states that students will have "increased proofreading and validation skills." This would come on the heels of the last article which cited evidence that students take greater care in their writing when they know that others will be reading their work. It also allows for some speedy feedback from classmates, family, and friends who read their work on the blog. All in all, blogs are a positive medium, when used safely and properly, for students to display their work.
 * Blogging **  My classroom blog     This blog is used as a parent-teacher communication forum. It acts in lieu of a classroom newsletter as I can let the parents know what is going on in the classroom, important upcoming dates, and show them samples of student's work. There is a Shelfari widget that allows parents to take a look at a sample of what is being read in the classroom as well as links to our classroom wiki and edmodo. These two websites allow for further information to be relayed to the parents (wiki) and to the students (wiki and edmodo).