Blogs in the Classroom

1. Give some specific ideas of how you could incorporate blogs into your classroom. What are the benefits and challenges to using this technology in your classroom? List some.
To use blogging in the classroom would be a wonderful change for the students. It would give them a chance to express themselves in creative new ways that they might not get to use elsewhere. I believe that the most common subject to use a computer with would be English/language arts. The children could each have their own blog and start a book discussion. They could all answer questions about a certain a book and then comment and compare answers with each other. Or in language arts the children could respond to the teacher’s blog of short story prompts. From there the children could critique each others’ work. For science the children could blog the progress of a project. For example I know that every third grade class does a seed project where they cultivate plants from the very beginning. This would be an excellent project to blog about. For history the students could keep a blog about the different characters that are discussed in class. Each night the children could go home and do a journal entry as the person we discussed that day. And finally for math the children could use blogging as a money journal. They could use the blog as a ledger for how much they have spent. They could also use the blog as an application journal; they would take the information used in that days class and explain how they would apply it to the real world.
The benefits of blogging are infinite. Children who blog in the classroom will learn how to use a computer and the internet in a way that could help them with their future career. They are also learning proper internet manners, something that there is no class for in the public school system. The children are also learning how to interact with one another without the teacher’s direct influence. As funny as that sounds the children are improving their people skills.
Blogging does face a few challenges though. Even in today’s high tech world there are still households that do not have a computer set up, and even if the family has a computer they might not have an internet connection. In addition some families are very strict and do not allow their children to be on the internet without their permission. Although these children could continue the project as a regular journal it would not be the same.

2. Why is it important to evaluate websites before using them in the classroom or in research? Do you think most people understand and apply these evaluation techniques? How would you incorporate them into your classroom and student projects? What ways could you teach students evaluation techniques?
A teacher needs to check any source before it is passed on to her students, and this includes web sources. It is important to evaluate an website used for educational reasons because you do not want to use the wrong information. As a teacher you do not want to teach your students wrong, and as a student you do not want to lose points for have incorrect information. I believe that the common person does not know how to evaluate a website correctly. Most people just go to the google and type in their search which can lead to some pretty interesting results. People also rely heavily on the first website they check, but if they are unsure of an answer the rule of thumb I was taught was to check 3 sites to see if they agree.
To teach students the evaluation techniques I would show the different incorrect information from the internet. I would show that things that are obviously wrong like author miscredits or science processes that are completely wrong. I would show them websites based off of what we are learning in class, that way they can compare the information. To teach kids the basic evaluation tools I would pick a different topic each day over the course of a week and go in depth at the beginning of the lesson and then at the end of the week I would have an entire lesson dedicated to a review. I would explain the importance of current information, the different website endings (edu, com, net, org, gov, ect.), talk about finding the author and who the author is, and in addition I would talk about where the site got its information from.