the benefits of edublogs

Note: My Edublog can be found here!

I've been a writer of personal blogs since the age of twelve or thirteen over a variety of platforms, so I assumed that creating a blog for the classroom wouldn't be an immediate challenge. However, as soon as I finished my "welcome to your classroom blog!" post, I found myself hesitant. What kind of voice do I use? was the first question that came to mind. What content should I have? was the second question. Would I really use this as a teacher? was the overall question that hovered in my brain as I created this 'role-play.' 

Developing my voice was certainly an individual learning experience that helped me analyse how I would present myself both in the classroom and online to my students, as well as how I would want to communicate with parents/guardians. I also had to make a shift from talking about myself (the theme of most of my personal blogs) to orienting around material learned in the classroom, fulfilling curriculum expectations, and creating open discussion and opportunities for critical thinking. The main thing I learned is that I would want my classroom blog to encourage comments rather than be something merely read, thus encouraging that web 2.0 mindset.

As well, I would want the classroom blog to be a place to "archive" any handouts that I would give out, similar to how Sakai operates. This is mostly because of personal experience - I have a horrible time sorting out papers properly and constantly misplace handouts, and that way students could easily access materials. In a way, this technology could be applied to my own teaching purposes because I would have those blackline masters readily available online rather than referring to a physical portfolio/filing cabinet. Most of all, having a new classroom blog each year and keeping the one before would be an amazing way to track progress and see how my teaching has developed and how students/parents react to the blog each year. 

The fantastic things about blogs is that they can be integrated in multiple disciplines; specifically as an educator, you could have a blog created from specific courses - a Language Arts blog for instance, with all the intermediate teachers blogging about various tools/strategies to be used in the classroom. It's a great tool for collaboration and for educators to network and share experiences and talk about issues. 

Overall, I could definitely see myself using a classroom blog in the future, but it would be dependent on two things: the school environment and knowing if a majority of the students have access to the Internet aside from school, and if I would have the time to update it on a regular basis!