Issues with Blogging

Blogging may become an issue when parents do not want their students work to be displayed or get onto the internet. Some parents may want to control how their child is communicating on the internet and may not be comfortable with them getting on to a blog and responding to class work. If this is the case, the teacher may have to go back to the more traditional way of writing and responding. The parents need to see the positive effect of writing and responding on a blog. The teacher will have to communicate this to the parents before the student can get onto the blog. The parents will hopefully have a better understanding and will be more willing to allow their child to share their thoughts or work on a blog after talking with the teacher. The parent also need to realize this is not just fun and games. They are actually working on writing and responding. The child may want to post a book review to share with others. This is a positive thing and would help other students pick books.

Benefits of Blogging

After reading the article about Pen Pals or ePals, by Nancy Necora Charron, she says that "Teacher and student comments indicate that the Internet pen pal program facilitates communication through the use of authentic tasks and teaches students about different cultures. Enthusiasm generated by the program translated into student

written-language production. Special-needs students, second-language learners, and general education

students reported enjoying writing to an authentic audience. The program facilitates problem solving and supports critical thinking in written language acquisition and the social nature of learning is evident in the correspondence between pen pals" (pg. 768, 2007). Students are having an authentic audience to respond to and communicate with. The students are learning about other cultures too. This is very beneficial because many students need a purpose to write. They don't just want to write to a prompt. Having an ePal would motivate them to want to write.

Writing with Technology Part 2

Blogging can be used in so many different ways. Teachers can use blogs to post classroom news, have mirror blogs (for reflection), showcase blogs, or literature response blogs. In my blog I am going to try to incorporate all areas of blogging so that students can reflect, respond, see their own work, and get news all in one place. Blogging is beneficial to parents, students, and teachers because we can all see the work and writing in one place. It is easy to access and fun to use at the same time.      

Writing with technology

After reading through many educational articles, I have found that writing is enhanced by using technology. Students are able to use higher order thinking skills. According to the HOT Blogging article by Lisa Zawilinski, "As online readers gather information to solve a problem, they frequently analyze information, critically evaluate, synthesize across multiple texts and communicate with others using instant messaging, e-mail, blogs, wikis, or other communication vehicles (Leu, Kinzer, et al., 2004; Leu et al., 2007). These essential new literacies of online reading comprehension emphasize higher order thinking skills like analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Anderson, 2005; Bloom, 1956; Coiro & Dobler, 2007) and can be practiced through blogging" (pg. 652, 2009). I would have never thought that blogging could improve higher order thinking skills. This is always an area as a teacher that we struggle with.

I just made a new Voki. See it here: