The Usefulness of Blogs

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.