Using Blogs in the Classroom

I think that blogs, if used effectively, can be a useful tool in the classroom. Blogs allow teachers to communicate with their students, and students to demonstrate what they are learning. I think that in some cases blogs could be a waste of students' time, but overall they are a great way to enhance learning outside the classroom. Many teenagers in this era are already comfortable using the internet to communicate with others, as we can see with websites such as MySpace and Facebook, along with blogs and vlogs (video blogs). They are already using these mediums to express themselves, so why not use blogs for education as well?

When I start teaching, I would like to experiment with different ways of using blogs in my classroom. One example from Chapter 6 that I liked was Mr. Sprankle's class blog, where each student has his/her own page to post creative assignments. I like this idea because all the students in the class can see each other's work and comment on it, and people outside the class can also see what they are doing. I think this would be a good way to display work to parents or other teachers. Since I will be teaching high school Spanish, I will probably have many different classes of different levels. If I used this type of blog, different classes could interact with each other through seeing others' work and posting comments. I would also like to try creating a blog community with other Spanish teachers and their classes, both within my school and with other schools in the same area or maybe even around the state/country.

As I am reading about blogs in the classroom, I have many ideas going through my head about how to implement blogs in my own classroom someday. I think they can be used as an effective tool for both teachers and students.