Blog or Article?

I wasn't really sure if we had to review a Blog or an article so I just did both.

There was an interesting point brought up at http://weblogg-ed.com/ by Will Richardson. His latest blog post was called It’s the Parent’s Fault. Not. It talks about a discussion that he had with a high school principal after a presentation. It was brought up during the presentation that no one is really teaching kids how to use MySpace or Facebook. The principal feels that it is the parents who should be teaching the students the ins and outs of the Internet. The presenter feels that it is our job as teachers and administrators to teach the students about the Internet and Internet safety. He feels that there is no reason why we cannot in some way figure out how to integrate those skills into the curriculum of first-third grade.

I think that this is an interesting question to ask and really got me thinking about whose responsibility it is to be teaching these children about the Internet. When I read this blog there were 34 posts to it. The posts were really interesting to read and it seemed like it was a topic that people have strong opinions on.

Article on Blogging

I found a really interesting article at http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/tech/tech217.shtml. The article is titled, Blogging? It’s Elementary, My Dear Watson! It was perfect for me since it discussed using blogs in grades as low as kindergarten.

The article begins by defining blogging for those readers who may be unfamiliar with the term. It then goes in to discuss the benefits of blogging. It notes that students quality of writing and their interest greatly improves when their work is being put online for an actual audience. The article gives examples of a few Blogs that are from fourth grade classrooms.

My favorite parts of the article were the safety tips it gave you on implementing blogging into your classroom. I thought the one program, Blogmeister, which is a blogging tool that allows you as the teacher to create student accounts on your blog. The students are able to freely add their own entries, but they send them to the teacher to approve before publishing them. I thought this was a great idea because the students are able to get their thoughts across, but as the teacher you are still able to keep an eye on what is being said.

I also enjoyed the idea of KidzBlog because it used a drawing tool which I could use for my kindergarten students.

I think the article brought up a lot of interesting ideas and things that you should check out if you are interested in incorporating blogging into your classroom.