To blog or not to blog.....it's a good question.

I suppose you have come here to learn about blogging. Is it something worthy of your time and effort, as it pertains to educating children? It is certainly one of the big by-words in education at the moment, especially in technology. I am here with you, trying to determine my own answer to this question: Is blogging a worthy effort for the educator?

First I suppose we should begin with, What is a blog. I found a great video link that explains the answer to that question better than anything else I have found. I am linking it here. If you really want to better understand exactly what a blog is, view this video. It is approximately three minutes long. I have watched the video, and now I think I have a better grasp of what a blog is, and maybe even an idea or two for some uses it might have.

Now my big question is how might a blog be used in education, in an elementary classroom?

After some more research, I found several uses for blogs in the classroom, some better than other. As a substitute for a regular teacher website, I found it much less affective than some other free tools. As a tool for posting book reports, I thought using a blog was a probably not the best tool. For teaching the writing process, I read many teacher comments that emphasized how much student enjoyed having the feedback blogs allowed. I found one particularly informative site, called "Implementing Research-Based Strategies" (scroll down), describing how a teacher used blogging as a real time editing and commenting tool for student writing. It also allowed him to utilize parent help with editing and commenting on student work (a very time consuming task as we all know), because the online nature of the work allow parent access from any online computer. Although I want to see more objective research, many teachers who have used blogging as a tool for teaching reading and writing insist they have seen marked gains in student ability in both areas.

Podcasting.... are you kidding me ?

Once again I am exploring new technologies and their possible use in the k12 classroom. I am completely sold on podcasting with video. I believe video is the most underutilized teaching tools available to educators. However, when it comes to podcasting audio only, I am somewhat skeptical. The very ideas of giving a student a recording of instructional material for him to listen to after he has left the classroom borders on humorous to me. My thought is, "I have to tap dance to get his attention live, and you think he is going to listen to canned me?"

I do understand and appreciate uses in the adult ed world, such as a college student listening to a missed lecture, or listening to a particularly important lecture prior to testing. Podcasting audio that emulates the audio textbook might also be useful, such as learning a new language with the aid of an audio recording. This sort of use might even be beneficial in the k12 classroom, although there are already easier to use technologies in place for this sort of project.

Perhaps when our district opens some of the doors necessary for me to do further exploration into podcasting (like the ability to download iTunes), I can envision more practical uses of this technology in the k12 classroom.

Ideas for audio-only podcasting will be greatly appreciated.