Blogging!

Like I said in my first post, I have never used blogging before this class. I am so glad that I have taken this class and learned a lot of beneficial information that I can take with me and use in my own classroom. 

One thing I would love to do in my classroom is set up a blog just for the parents. I would use this blog to post school information, what we are doing in the classroom, and even some of the students' work.  I could also use this blog as a classroom wish list for parents to see some of the materials that we could use in the classroom. I think that parent communication is very important and blogging will be a quick way to keep the parents updated about their children. 

There are so many ideas for how blogging could be used in the classroom. I think it would be a great way to set-up pen pals. Instead of sending letters to pen pals in another country, students could blog to their pen pals and get a response in a shorter amount of time. I think that students would love communicating to other children their age that are from a different country. Instead of reading textbooks, this is a way that they can learn about another country and its culture by actually talking to someone from that country. I really like this idea because any age could do this activity. With the younger grades, the teacher could have a class discussion and talk to the students about questions they could ask. After the discussion, the teacher could type the blog. When the pen pal replies, the teacher would read the response to the entire class. When I have some time this summer, I would love to look into finding another classroom to blog with from another country. 

Blogging would be a great way to encourage communication between students. I could use it as a topic starter. With this idea, I would post a blog and then all of the students would comment about that topic, kind of like what we are doing in this class. I think blogging is a great way to see what the students know and how they are progressing without wasting time during the school day. 

I think it would be interesting to create a blog each week in which would post a photo as well as use audio to ask a question about that photo. For instance, in my kindergarten classroom, I could have posted one of the pictures of the chicks and embed audio using Voki or another audio Web 2.0 tool to ask the students questions such as, "What was your favorite part about having the chicks in the classroom? What did you learn about the chicks?" This would be a quick way to get feedback from the students. I post a picture and audio of something that we haven't learned about in the classroom. By asking a question such as," What do you know about TPACK?" The students would have a chance to respond and then I could read the comments to see what the students already know about a particular subject.

You could use a blog to post a famous author's website in which students could explore and comment about their favorite books or books that they might want to read from this author. This blog could develop a discussion about the students' favorite books or it might persuade other students to want to read these books. 

There are so many ideas that you can use a blog for, it just takes a TPACK teacher :) to creatively think of ways to innovate these ideas for his or her students.