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.
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I have found at least two ways blog pages are used by K-12 teachers.
One way is for book reports. The teacher's blog is much like a template with questions about the book, and the students' comments are the answers to the questions she has posed. I can see where this might be useful in classroom environment like the outback of Australia, but in the typical US classroom it seems there are better, easier tools to achieve the same objective.
A second use I have found is this: teachers using a blog page for a classroom web page, where assignments are given and information is posted. A free way to get a web hosting.
I noticed these blog pages were old - 2005, so I think I need to look further.
One example of a book report blog - Sarah, Plain, and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan - http://sarahplainandtall.blogspot.com/
While searching for classroom uses for blogs, I came across a blog posted by a student, commenting on a class where she has learned to blog. She comments that she like blogging because it allows for feedback, but that she did not find it very "Educational". Worth a look:
http://clairebear.learnerblogs.org/
Test for Beth.
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