Blogs
can be used for many different reasons.
I use mine for professional purposes.
First of all, it gives me a way to communicate with those of you who are
in my online class…and models blog usage so you can see how it might be
incorporated in your classroom (or as a way to communicate with
parents/guardians if you wanted). It
does allow you to communicate with a particular group way more easily than
simply one-on-one. And who hasn’t been
tormented with many “dings” as folks reply to all to a group text?
In the
classroom, blogs will definitely help you to get your students to write. We know that whether we are teaching math,
science, social studies, language arts-any subject-we need to get our students
to write! Make no mistake; your students will be much more apt to write on the
computer than on paper. Another plus is
that since the new testing is done on computer, students need to get more adept
at writing (and typing) this way. I would start students writing on a blog very
simply, perhaps getting them to give a couple sentence response to some topic
that they are interested in and like to talk about. This way, they can get comfortable with the
process, rather than just school content.
Once they have the process down, then I would introduce blog posts for
their responses that relates to the content I am teaching.
Certainly,
there would need to be “teaching” to introduce blogs, along with some strong
guidelines as to appropriateness and good etiquette (not to worry, you can
delete inappropriate comments on your blog, but it still helps to put the onus
on the students!).
Please
comment on this posting by hitting Comment key below…tell what you think and
how you might be able to use this tool with your students for the content area
you are working on. I know blogs aren’t
for everyone, but please humor me for the purpose of this course. After you have commented, you can comment on
other posts…be sure to scroll down below to see other posts I have on this
blog-you might find some of them interesting!
