Using blogs in my own learning and teaching

            Blogs can be an effective tool in both learning and teaching. For my own learning, I plan to use blogs as a tool to get connected with other teachers. My hope is that I can get advice about starting out as a new teacher, and what to expect my first year. Also, I hope to use bogs as a way to learn new and fun ideas for different activities and lessons that I can incorporate into my classroom.

            As for teaching, I plan to use blogs differently depending on the grade that I will be teaching. If I am teaching in the lower elementary grades, I will use blogs as a way to keep parents and other readers informed and up to date about what we are learning and accomplishing in class, and as a way to document special events that go on. I plan on incorporating pictures, videos, and maybe even audio of my students completing fun activities and projects, as well as posting any information that parents may need to know about such as field trip information, classroom guidelines, etc.

            However, if I am teaching in the upper elementary grades, I will use blogs much differently. I will use the blogs as a way to get all of my students to get involved, as some students may not feel as comfortable sharing their thoughts/opinions in class. In the beginning, I will use blogs for various assignments. I will create a blog where the students respond about ideas or content that we talked about in class; I might create a blog after a field trip and have the students post about their favorite part of the trip, what they learned from it, or things they did not like; and I will create a blog to showcase the writing abilities of my students. The students could post short stories, poetry, etc. Not only will the students be posting comments, but I will also have them respond to other posts. This will help the students learn how to respond when there is an audience present, and it will also teach them how to give meaningful comments/feedback instead of just “I agree” or “I like your post.” Once the students feel comfortable with blogging, I want to use the blogs as a way for my students to connect with and learn about other students from around the country and hopefully even the world.  The students on both ends could learn a lot about each other from just the blogs, but we could also create mini geography lessons out of it by plotting the locations of the people we are talking to on the map and then discussing about that region/area. There are so many ways to utilize blogs in the classroom, but these are my initial ideas so far.