Blogs in Education

The Five Issues:
1) The results are somewhat similar. The first site listed by all three search engines was the same. However, when I chose a different site on yahoo and msn than that one that I left on Google, they were different. The site on Google, titled “EdBlogger Praxis” (Delgado, 2007) is one that is basically a gateway to other educational blogs. It's full of links to blogs that the author finds interesting, podcasters, and blogs that might be helpful or informative for educators. The site brought up by yahoo was actually an article titled “Educational Blogging” (Downes, 2004) instead of an actual blog, but it was very informative and talked about the use of blogging in schools, specifically in one particular elementary school. The site brought up by msn is a list of educational technology blogs (Schrock, 2004). I clicked on one, and it belongs to a teacher that uses it to talk about what her students are doing these days (Blake, 2004). They were similar in that they were all talking about educational blogs, but dissimilar in that only one of them was an actual educational blog by a teacher about her students.
2) Blogs are currently being used in a variety of really interesting and creative ways in the K-12 classrooms. The first that I clicked on, edublogs, is a blog hosting service, and has a few blogs of interest, such as the foreign language resources blog that lists assignments for students enrolled in a certain class, as well as a PE blog with articles that students from its school can read and respond to if they need to make up points for a day in which they were not there or could not participate in PE. Still another site has lots of links to different videos that the teacher obviously thinks the students should watch. I would watch one, but I have a dial-up connection, so perhaps I’ll keep that experience for some other time. Next, I went to the Meriwether Lewis Elementary School Classroom Notes page, where different teachers have the opportunity to post blogs on the school’s site. It’s probably pretty nice for the teachers to be able to blog without having to worry about constantly maintaining a website. Parents (or students, though I think the blog is largely directed at informing parents about their students’ education) can click on a teacher’s name to view just their posts, so as not to waste their time reading all about classes in which their student is not enrolled.
3) According to one website, “RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading” (Bricklin, 2005). The site goes on to say, “a Web browser for RSS content”, and it basically does a lot of the work for the person online by keeping track of and sorting through different websites for the person. I believe that we were shown an example of one in class a week or two ago. It presents the possibly relevant material to the user without forcing them to read through everything themselves. As a teacher, I think that using RSS readers and aggregators would really simplify my life. I would need to keep up on current events, especially those involving Spanish-speaking countries, and to be honest, I don’t know how much time I’ll have to spend pouring through the newspapers in search of relevant news, so this will help me to know what I want and need to without bogging me down with useless professional sports information or things like that.
4) I think that blogging will have a positive and negative aspect. On the one hand, it helps to get students engaged, to gain useful skills using technology that will be helpful to them later on in life, and encourages them to take more control over their own learning in many cases (this is all assuming students are the ones doing the blogging). On the other hand, students could very well lose the ability to write well on the spot simply because they get so used to blogging on the computer. As far as teachers blogging, I think it is a fabulous idea! It helps to keep parents in the loop about what you and your students are doing with your time and their taxpayer dollars, and it can help students keep on track because often times, teachers post the assignments online. That way, if a student forgets or loses an assignment, there’s no need to worry. We’ve all slipped up at one point and lost a paper, so this helps that predicament to not be a stressing point.
5) Two pros of using blogs and RSS readers is that they save paper and they allow teachers and students more freedom. With all of the assignment sheet printing that you’re not doing with a blog, it makes it easy to save paper. Additionally, having a blog gives a lot of control to the student because it puts them a little more in charge of their own learning. If the teacher is doing the blogging, the student would be in charge of checking the site, accessing links and material provided, and doing the assignments listed there. If the student is doing the blogging, they’re in charge of how the site looks, they have the option to receive feedback through comments that people leave, and they have something to show off. They have a blog. They made it themselves. Two cons of using blogs and RSS readers is that it takes away the practice that the student would get actually writing longhand, and, as far as RSS readers go, they take away the research skills that students should be required to develop. Students should be able to research without having the computer do all of the work. It helps them to know how to sort through things and choose what is a good option for them rather than just useless knowledge/trivia. Promoting the conservation of paper (and, thereby the conservation of forests/trees) is something that is good for both your students and your fellow teachers to see. Schools use a lot of paper, so I think it’d be really nice to focus on not using quite so much unnecessarily.


References


Blake, J (2004). The Junk EduBlog. Retrieved September 25, 2007, Web site:
http://theedublog.blogspot.com/
Bricklin, Daniel S. (2005, November 9). What is RSS?. Retrieved September 25, 2007, from Whatis?com Web site:http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci1088619,00.html

Delgado, Albert (2007, 2, 19). Retrieved September 25, 2007, from EdBlogger Praxis Web site: http://educational.blogs.com/

Downes, Stephen (2004, September/October). Educational Blogging. Retrieved September 25, 2007, from EDUCAUSE Review Web site: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp?bhcp=1

Schrock, Kathy (2004). Kathy Schrock's Educational Technology Blog Listing. Retrieved September 25, 2007, Web site: http://kathyschrock.net/edtechblogs.htm