Blogs in the Classroom

"OK class, let's take out a piece of paper and begin writing."  This is a common statement that you can hear in a typical classroom, a statement that is being played like a broken record.  It's time for teachers to change and begin to incorporate more technology into the classroom.  Blogs are more and more frequently being used on a daily basis by students outside the classroom, not it's time to incorporate them into the classroom.

Blogs can really be beneficial in the classroom from daily journaling to creative writing.  Student's know that they can have an audience who actually reads what they have to say.  Comments on a student's blog could spark new ideas that a student had never thought of before or could allow a student to defend something that they believe in.  Since blogging occurs on the computer, the students have access to things like spell check and dictionaries and thesauruses online.  I know for me personally, it is much easier to type a word in Microsoft works and use spell check than to page through a cumbersome dictionary to find the correct spelling of the word I'm trying to use. Student's today want quick and easy, not always the best method, but, for whatever reason, hard work, or even something that requires a little more effort than normal is becoming the norm among students today.

Blogs should also be considered for those students with special needs.  Take a student who has a hard time with writing.  With a piece of paper and a pencil and a time limit of 15 minutes, a student who may have a problem connecting his thoughts to the paper because of a physical barrier may not receive the best grade on a daily journaling topic.  However, if you give that same child a chance to write his thoughts on a screen with no physical barrier of the pencil, he may have written a daily journal that merits a high score.
One major downfall of using blogs in a classroom is that it is being shared on the internet for the whole world to see.  Teacher's really need to be responsible and do their research to find sights that will protect their students but still allow them to creatively express themselves.  Teacher's should also remember to teach their students about how to be safe when using a computer and what information can be shared and what information should never be shared on the internet.