BP2_201041_EduUses4Blogs

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I found that blogging can easily be used in high school and even in middle school to help the children express themselves, put their thoughts and ideas out to a larger audience, and even to create dialogue between a larger population of students. I went into this blog deciding I wanted to focus on how elementary students could successfully use a blog to improve their education. I found an article titled The Joy of Blogging. In it Anne P. Davis and Ewa McGrail discuss how one group of 5th graders used blogging to improve their reading, writing, and communication skills. For this project the authors of the article, Anne a teacher and Ewa a university researcher worked with 16 kids weekly on blogging. They essentially built what they called a blogging community. They taught the children the basics about blogging and what it is. The kids started by writing about current events, things they were learning about in school and things that interested them. Eventually the students were writing blogs and responding to each other’s blogs. The authors discussed the preplanning involved with this project and that included finding reliable people to help with responding to the students’ blogs. This taught the students proper ways to communicate with others and allowed them to think about whom their audience was when writing.
I love the idea that the kids were writing using the computer and sharing their writing with others through the ability to post it as a blog. I found though that this project took a lot of preplanning as they called it and time preparing the students for successful and safe blogging. Essentially what I learned from this article was that blogging can be very successful in teaching communication, improve writing skills, editing skills, and reading skills in elementary school with a great deal of planning, preparation, and student cooperation.
The ideas/possibilities for blogging in high schools and middle schools are endless. One website I found, http://www.slideshare.net/sqoolmaster/educational-uses-of-blogs-and-tags-234136, lists just some of the possibilities. The author talks about starting a book club, show casing student art, creating a portfolio, sharing classroom news letters, and provide students with a thought provoking question so that they can add their comments after reading, just to name a few ideas.
I found that for upper grades blogging would be an extremely useful and creative tool to introduce. For my students and me it will take some creative planning and instruction. I know I will continue to brainstorm ideas for incorporating blogging into my lesson plans.

Reference
Davis, A., & McGrail, E. (2009). The Joy of Blogging. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 74-77. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.