Educational Blogs

After searching around on the internet about educational blogs I have discovered there are many great uses for blogs in the educational world. Blogs can be used to share teaching ideas with other teachers. Blogs can be used by the students to create pen pals across the world as well and do group projects. Blogs would be a good way to get kids out of the normal classroom setting; you can have students respond to reading questions online in a blog rather than doing the normal classroom discussion setting. Lastly, blogs can be a beneficial way to keep parents informed and to get their input.

Aggregators and RSS/readers can be used in the classroom to help students locate other peoples blogs based on a specific topic. Specifically, I could create a project for the students to find an activity based on a specific topic I give them and put it in to action. The requirement would be for them to go on to Web quest to find an activity. Once they find the activity they will have to adapt it to fit out classroom standards.

I think that blogging and using RSS readers will open more opportunities and ideas for K-12 classrooms. Teachers can find more ideas of the classrooms. Also, incorporating these two tools in the classroom will get students thinking about technology, which is good because our world is become more and more dependent on technology. It also opens new doors for students who are tired on the normal classroom setting.

It is a positive to use technology like blogs and RSS readers in education, however there are some downsides to using these tools in the classroom. One downfall is that you cannot control who the student is contacting or who is contacting the student. Another negative is that the students maybe too excited about being on a computer and not really learning the material.