Blogging: A free web page one creates to record thoughts, ideas, photos, commentaries, etc, for others to see, read and/or comment on. It can be a community builder. I chose this subject because I am interested in using blogging in my elementary classroom for book reviews, journaling, and other writing projects.
There was a lot of great discussion about blogging on Classroom 2.0. Issues about the effectiveness of blogging, good places to create blogs for the classroom, manners, what blogging should and shouldn't be used for were among the many topics discussed.
Questions were raised about the effectiveness of blogging. Teachers questioned whether they were really helping their students improve their writing, or whether this was just a fancy techno- tool that was not necessary to learn how to write well. One teacher suggested having students write out their journals in a notebook first, as it was just too tempting to write 1-2 sentences on a blog and push the "publish" button so they could see their work online. She felt she got deeper, more meaningful answers from her students when they hand wrote their answers out first.
Blogging can be a great community builder. Students can be taught how to respect the work of others and learn the value of commenting positively and giving encouragement to classmates. They can also learn to critique in a constructive way. It is necessary for the teacher to teach these communication skills before the class begins posting comments on a classmate's work. One teacher put it well: The rules are similar to those on the playground.
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1 comment:
Ever since I have learned about blogging it has been so amazing of the communication power that it has. You are so write about how it can connect the classroom,it is exactly like a community.
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