Upon entering this class, Blogging had no educational meaning to me. The only type of blogging I knew about was Livejournal. When I was in college, I had a personal blog, as did my friends, that kept me connected with people on a daily basis. It was a great way to update friends that went to other colleges on my life at Geneseo. Even after starting this blog for class, which was similar to the blog I used to have except talking about class instead of my life, I didn’t make the educational connection until now. This week’s class and readings showed me just what I can do to utilize blogs in an educational setting. I thought it was great how the students were able to use blogs to communicate with other schools. In college, one of my classes became pen pals (e-mail pals?) with a 4th grade class in the same county, communicating through e-mail. We wrote in a Word document, e-mailed it to their teacher, she gave it to the student, the student added to the word document, and the teacher e-mailed it back to us, and the cycle started over again. That sounds complicated, huh? Looking back, it would have been much much much easier if we had used a blog, and just added to the blog or commented on what our pen pal (blog-pal?) wrote.
Even putting the class website together as a blog is something I never would have thought of, but its definitely something that I will use. Websites (unless there is a comment/contact section) never allow for discussion or comments. To be able to post the students’ work and have people comment on it is phenomenal; such a self-esteem booster. Teachers could even use the blog as a place for students to creatively write, no judgements, or corrections on spelling/grammer. I’ve even noticed reading some classmates’ blogs that people get caught up in the typing when you really have something on your mind, usually causing multiple spelling/grammer errors. Using a computer, spelling and grammer become pushed into the back of your mind as you let loose all of the thoughts that are being held hostage in your brain. Since typing is much quicker than writing (well, for most of us), allowing students to type rather than write gives them an opportunity to let their mind run wild for a while, rather than consciously thinking about what word they are slowly writing next. To me, this is a great way to get students to learn to love to write.
Chinchillaaaaaa 