discussion 1: blogs...

Blogs have a great many uses in the classroom. I can only speak from experience in middle school aged students, but even in that setting, blogging was the way to go. We did journals and projects that all surrounded blogs. Blogs are the way to go for teachers who have to check those journals. The students are required to update their blog *x* many times a week and all the teacher has to do is subscribe to the rss feed to be able to check for the updates. This is WAYYYY better than having to check 150 papers with 3 journals on each. Also, one of the other teachers gave the students a collaborative project in which they had to research and create a blogspot as in the perspective of the person they researched. It was a very cool project.

This social network is the way to go, but unfortunately I did not know about it. I mostly used blogs in my creative design class. I created a google group and the students each made their blogspots private except for the people who were already in their google group. It was very much like a private "social network" with a discussion board, private chat, and a blogspot all attached.

Blogs give students (and anybody really) a creative outlet to express themselves and can also be used for thoughtful discussions.

8th graders had a pretty hard time listening and following instructions so this made things especially difficult when trying to get them all set up and ready to go. Some of them also did not want to participate and still others got very hung up on the design and layout of their blog that they never spent any time on the actual content. I tried to express to them that there had to be a balance, but some never listened... at all! BUT there were some who made some great posts and excellent looking pages.

Blogs are also great for teachers. Blogspot can be customized as much as any "made-from-scratch" website. All you have to know is a little CSS or at least be willing to do a little Google searching for some tutorials. Blogs can be used to post assignments, communicate with parents, provide insight for projects, and encourage guided discussions for classes. Posts can be monitored and approved before they are posted so that nothing inappropriate is let through.

Also everything is changing. Blogs are getting more and more features so the future of blogging and such is pretty exciting... at least to me