After only a few months of educational blogging and a measly 3 blog posts under my belt, I have found that this format is an excellent tool for educators to utilize. Blogs can be used for a variety of reasons, from communicating the ideas of the teacher to the students, parents, or whomever may see it, to putting the actual content of the classroom on an accessible and easily navigable website for readers to explore. When researching successful blogs by teachers, I came across one by Lisa Land Cooper, who has three running blogs, each dedicated in their own differing ways o teaching a history lesson in the chunk of a blog post. In these blogs, Lisa utilizes pictures and storytelling to paint simple yet deep stories on a variety of subjects, and even has one blog dedicated entirely to local and general histories of her home state, Georgia. Lisa has shown me and everyone who views her blog(s) that blogging can be an equally effective tool to use within the classroom as it is outside of it as well.
As I then proceeded to browse through my fellow classmates' blogs, I found several topics of importance among them. The first that caught my interest was Carly Gibbons' post on classroom size and size reduction, which gave great insight into the idea of how class sizes impacted teacher effectiveness. Her argument, and the evidence used as a basis for it, clearly lay out how smaller classrooms lead to more interactions and bonding both between the students, but also between the students and their teacher, who is able to know almost all of their individual educational needs. Next, I viewed Jackson Scott's post on the use of Movies and Documentaries in the classroom. Here, Jackson lays out both the challenges and optimal ways of handling film within a class setting, with his main point being that any use of it should be utilized as a "visual textbook" and have supplementary material alongside it as to ensure the film is not used as a break for the teacher or students. Finally, the blog that caught my eye the most was Alison Price's piece on Library Censorship, and going in I had honestly no idea what to expect. What Alison wrote about here is the issue of certain books being banned on the grounds that they cover issues around LGBT or race; Alison here argues (albeit through, although clever, annoyingly black-highlighted text) that teachers should discourage such banning and possibly even have personal classroom libraries, all to ensure that every student has some story that they can relate to, no matter how controversial outsiders may find it.
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| Blogging can be used to project ideas, materials, and more to a global audience. |
To wrap things up, I'll now discuss my thoughts on blogging as an educator. I personally believe blogging is an effective way to share ideas to both students and parents, or even to others who take an interest in how my classroom functions. I now see it as an avenue to directly share ideals and thoughts, or as a neat way to incorporate a lesson for students to digest. Blogging even has the potential to be taught to my future students (well, I'm more confident in the High School age range at least), so that they may be creative and use the format to regurgitate information or create their own soapbox to share what travels through their mind at any given moment. A word that previously held no substantive meaning or feeling in my mind, "Blogging" has now become an experience and tool I'll likely not forget anytime soon.
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