Journal#4

I found the article, “Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Blog” by Patricia Deubel, to be somewhat interesting. I had never thought about how blogs could be used in elementary education before. I liked how the author started out the article in the first person discussing the sort of pros and cons of using a blog in a K-12 classroom. I definitely agree with the author that if you were to decide to use a blog in a K-12 classroom, there would need to be some purpose in order for it to be effective. She then goes on to talk about how to set up and moderate a blog in order to make sure that there is a purpose tied to an instructional outcome.

Is it realistic to think that blogs could work in lower elementary grades? I think for very simple things that they could work. For things like weekly discussions as homework and things of that nature it may be a little beyond students lower than 4^th grade. However I think that for a specific unit say in science or history, that you could ask students to do some research and provide instructions for students to post some information that they learned to a blog, and then as the teacher, you could respond to student posts with some questions or possibly use those questions to start a discussion in class the following week.

How do I think I could best utilize the use of blogs in my future classroom? As I plan to teach 2^nd or 3^rd grade my point made above would apply. I could see the use of a blog to be very helpful in communicating with parents sort of like a newsletter. I think I could also use it to post weekly homework assignments so that parents would have a way of knowing what their child is supposed to be doing instead of relying on their children to tell them. I have found out in my limited time spent in elementary classrooms, that there are some students that will lie to their parents about their homework, telling them that they don’t have any or that they already finished it. This could be a tool for parents, the ones who care to check anyway, to know exactly what their children’s homework assignments are so that they can check to make sure that it is finished and it could be used for both students and parents as a way to post questions that they may be having with homework assignments as well.