December 2005 — Features
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Why Blog?
The Classroom/Blog/Home Connection
Log on to www.mrwrightsclass.com
and see how a thirdgrade teacher at Wyman Elementary School in Rolla, MO, is
using a blog to communicate with his parents. Those aforementioned papers that
never seem to make it home in the backpack—such as the weekly spelling
list or field-trip permission slips—can now be accessed by parents on
Christopher Wright’s blog. Plus, Wright’s blog is interactive; parents
can post comments or send him questions.
—posted on Thursday, December 8, 2005 @ 11:30 pm
Barriers to Blogging in Schools
Even though the technology for blogging is free or relatively inexpensive, the
student-to-computer ratio in schools continues to get better than ever, and
Internet connectivity has reached nearly 100 percent, there are still challenges
to blogging in education.
Security, for one. As Arquillos says, “We couldn’t allow kids to just start posting their names and identities online.” To address that issue, the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology decided to have sites that teachers used for their classes, as well as private, members-only sites for their collaboration projects. The teachers publish their blogs publicly, and students are able to interact with one another while knowing their personal information is secure.
The other challenge is monitoring the content of what students are writing.
While you certainly don’t want to censor student work, just as you developed
an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) when your school began to offer students access
to the Internet, it is important to develop guidelines for acceptable blogging.
This may simply be an amendment to your school’s or district’s AUP,
but it needs to be information that students are aware of—before they
become bloggers.
—posted on Friday, December 9, 2005 @ 3:48 pm
