When considering why we use blogs, what needs to be considered is what we want the blogs to do? For classroom teachers, blogs can be used to post assignments, remind students about upcoming deadlines, keep parents in the loop on what is going on in their children's classes, and share lessons with other teachers. Classroom teachers can also use this space to show student work (with parental permission), which is an alternative to posting things on the walls of their rooms and gives students another place to see their own work when it has been done well. Parents can then log on to these blogs and feel a certain pride when they see their own child's work posted for everyone else to see. Basically, a blog can be an online bulletin board for teachers, but with the additional ability given to students and parents to comment back to the teacher ("I loved that assignment!" "It was wonderful to see my son's work posted online!" "Thank you for letting me know that my daughter had a project due next week. She keeps telling me that she has no homework.")
Library Media Teachers can use their blogs in similar ways. In addition, LMTs can also promote the LMC, its programs, books, and resources. For example, at my own LMC blog, http://lmc8062.blogspot.com, I have used the page to do much of these things. When we had the Black History Month Trivia Contest, I posted the contest rules and a picture of the grand prize on the blog. Since the blog is the homepage on my computers, students who went to use the computers immediately saw the contest information and were inspired to participate. I've also used my blog to post book reviews, important notices, and other items.
One of the bonuses of a blog over a webpage that was discussed in class (Thanks, Karen!) was that blogs have the advantage of creating a community for everyone to post. You can give many people permission to post on your blog and/or you can allow people to make comments. With this, you can create a meeting place for clubs and book groups, so that everyone can go online and post a message to you or to anyone else who's commented.
Blogs like this one are also fairly easy to navigate and give even the newest computer users an easy place to post to the Internet.
A disadvantage, however, is the lack of flexibility. Here, there is less that you can do to manipulate a page. There are fixed templates and you only really have the one page to work with. Creating cascading pages is very difficult and time-consuming. However, as the blog world continues to evolve, this will be less and less of a problem.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I love your comment that a blog is an online bulletin board that students and parents can reply to, that's awesome! Keeping in touch with parents is a difficult thing to do for classroom teachers who have 20 to 30 students. I can't imagine trying to communicate with the 940 student's family's I have at my school. It would a wonderful way to communicate with the various student's homes indeed.
Your blog is definitely an inspiration to me for the upcoming school year. Showcasing events, highlighting school achievements and numerous other applications are possible through this technology.
I also agree with you that creating and navigating a blog is incredibly easy and I can imagine even first or second graders explaining to their parents how to get around and find information. Also, since my school has a strong technology teacher, I could possibly get her on board to help with some of the basics of navigating and responding to the blog.
The lack of flexibility is not a huge problem for beginners like me but I can definitely see limitations to this format. For example, I would need a separate page for English and Spanish and that would probably get confusing for the viewers. Overall, I think using a blog is a good way to communicate and keep in touch without killing more trees and going over our printing budget every year. Thanks for the ideas.
Post a Comment