Using Blogs in the Classroom

Karen Park Richardson's May 2008 article "Don't Feed the Trolls" was an interesting commentary on the use of blogs for teaching civil discourse. I agree that civil discourse is an extremely important skill to teach our children. It teaches respect for others and as she said, the basis of rules for conversation within a democratic society. It used to be that conversation was carried out in person, in writing, and over the phone. Now that we have the Internet and the vastness of its connectivity for communication, the possibilities for our conversations are virtually endless. Unfortunately, being on the other side of a computer screen from the people to whom you are speaking can generate a false sense of anonymity and may lead to a lack of feeling of responsibility for our words and their effect. There was a statement that Richardson made that I did not agree with. She referred to the "spreading of gossip and innuendo, leaving mean-spirited, ugly comments in social networking sites, or posting inflammatory information" as "less dramatic abuses". I think the more this technology is used by our children, the more we will see that this isn't a lesser abuse. There are already news headlines about teen suicides related to this phenomena. It just goes to show that our children need to be instructed on how to handle this powerful tool in an appropriate and productive way. The Internet and its many tools such as blogging are important, and are becoming more so everyday. The capabilities that we have at our fingertips are staggering. We will fight to keep up, and at the same time our lives are being made richer and more streamlined with every leap forward.

An example of this is using blogging in the classroom setting such as Mr. Harbeck has done with his Math Zone blog. This is my first experience with blogging, although I am familiar with the concept. Upon logging on to Mr. Harbeck's site, I was a little overwhelmed. There were an endless selection of places to click, some took me to useful areas of the blog, others took me to what seemed like unrelated material. After navigating for a while, I got the gist of the intentions of the blog, what it was being used for, and some ideas for what I might incorporate into my classroom plans.

The classroom calendar with its potential for increasing the level of parental involvement and awareness was particularly interesting to me. As in our own adult social lives, we see that some of our friends are more responsive to letters, some to phone calls, and some to emails. I think that the possibility that we may be able to lasso in the parents who respond better to web format could do nothing but benefit students. Also, though I will be teaching at the younger grade levels, I thought that the student "chat" back and forth on how to do assignments, what was expected of them, and just general what do you think questions was extremely interesting. This encourages group efforts, collaboration, and a wonderful sense of classroom community. I also think that this links classroom assignments to students' "outside lives" in a way that makes it feel more relevant to them and to their futures. This could serve as a way to get students more motivated, and to engage them on levels that attract their interest.