Blog # 1...Why Blog in the classroom?

In a world today when students are more influenced by athletes, singers, and movies stars, it is hard to capture the attention of a pupil with school and assignments, and it is even harder to keep their attention. With new emerging technology, it has become somewhat easy, but challenges still lie ahead.

And the number 1 culprit?  Ironically, it’s technology.

             While helpful, technology can still be a hindrance to an educator, mainly because students use technology for reasons educators would deem wrong. For example, a teacher would not have a problem with a child texting after school. But when the student texts during class, or even worse (gasps) submits an essay written completely in texting jargon it is there the problem arises.

            Luckily, educators have begun to incorporate new strategies into their lessons in order to somewhat repair the damage that has been done the psyche of students by incorporating tools students may use on the outside of the classroom for fun into their lesson, in order to engage students and make their learning experience slightly more authentic to their actually lives.

            On technique that educators can incorporate is blogging. Blogs or web logs as some call them, are an interactive websites maintained by an individual or individuals who provide news, video, commentary, and other types of media to the public on a regularly scheduled basis.  The use of blogs in the classroom could help students gather information about their local community as well as the world at large. For instance, if a student had to complete a report about local clubs in his or her community, he or she could turn to their blogging community to gather information about specific clubs and their practice (almost as if they were gathering information for an ethnographic research paper). In turn, because they were able to gather this information by reading these blogs, they could then become bloggers themselves and through their own written word, report back on their findings. This option will help students with their creative and writing capabilities and would also satisfy a few standards in a few academic areas. If this project were in fact for an ethnographic study for English Language Arts (my field of course), than it would satisfy standards 1 and 2 which state respectively, “Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding,” and , “Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.” Students will be able to practice writing and through their comments to each other, they can actually learn from each other. Also in the end, students will save many trees, as they will be able to upload their work onto their blog rather than print it out and hand it in. This will minimize:

1)    The random papers that students carry around the entire semester

2)    The  missing homework assignments

3)    The missing paper that you as an educator want to use at the beginning of the year as an example for your next group of students but can’t because it has strangely enough disappeared.

Clearly in this case, blogs are winners.

            Besides focusing on improving the writing and sharing between students, blogs can also be used by teachers is the “class portal”.  I have seen several schools use it and it is a tool that can be used to minimize the land I like to call the “Land of I Didn’t Know/ I Forgot”.  When I was a student, I had an agenda and I wrote down all homework assignments and there was no question as to what was expected of me in school. The new harsh reality nowadays is that students don’t write down homework, they don’t remember when things are due, and parents are so busy they don’t really know what’s going in their child’s school. A class portal is a tool usually run by the teacher that can list EVERYTHING from due dates to homework assignments, to the syllabus to class notes. A class portal would be the end to the “Land of I Didn’t Know/I Forgot”. And parents can always check the portal so they can feel like they have some knowledge of what is going on in their child’s academic career.  

            Finally, I’d just like to say that it’s up to educators to incorporate technology in the classroom to guide our students to better academic futures!


-Amanda