Blogs and Language

Blogs seem like a creative way to integrate technology into the classroom. Blogs allow for a sense of ownership, thus blog owners will be more apt to take their blog, their writing, and their overall product seriously. It's a reflection of themselves. And when another internet user leaves a comment on your blog, it is quite validating of your "worth" as a blogger.

Another advantage of blogging is that readers can easily track one's progress over time. Unless blog entries are set to private (which would defeat the purpose of using them in a language classroom), readers can easily see all previous entries and contrast those earlier entries with later ones. Students and readers may be surprised by how much the blog owner has improved regarding his or her language ability.

Because blogs are easily customizable, blog owners may be more interested in maintaining them because they can add their favorite pictures, You Tube videos, polls, etc. When you are interested in something, your performance improves. And if learning doesn't seem like learning, that would seem to make this a tool worth pursuing in a K-12 environment, where motivation is often a problem.

One of the disadvantages of blogs that should be of particular concern to K-12 teachers is the element of privacy. Anything on the internet is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. If a child blogger posts information on his blog that can identify his address or other personal information, that introduces risks that parents and instructors may find unacceptable. And what about strangers leaving comments on the blogs? This could be circumvented by changing the blogs' settings so that only registered users or particular users can access the blogs or leave comments.

Maybe this is one reason why I'm not much of a K-12 kind of guy, even though I've taught children English before...