A Blog About Blogging

It has been a long and convoluted journey that has brought me to be here in the Faculty of Education. Growing up I always said that I wanted to be an anesthesiologist, but only because it's a big word and my friends didn't know what it meant; in reality, however, I didn't really know what I wanted my career to be. It was only after teaching English in Japan for 15 months that I realized that being a teacher could be entirely satisfying for the rest of my life. While I was over there I got my first exposure to blogging as well. In order to give my friends and family back home a portal through which they could look into my very non-Canadian life, I started blogging every week about simple things like grocery shopping, trains, and the ridiculous mistakes I made while learning the language.

It is only since being in the education program that I have began to think about other applications for blogging. The more I read and the more I think for myself how it can be used in the classroom, the more I get excited; there are many fabulous ways to use blogging as an educational tool.

One year in elementary school our teacher collaborated with another teacher from a different school and our classes became pen pals. After writing back a forth for a few months with the individual we were paired up with, we traveled to their school to meet our pen pal and hang out with them for a few hours. Blogging could be used as a substitute for pen and paper, and instead of having a pen pal across the city, teachers could collaborate across the ocean. I think this would be a great way to get students to think globally.

Students could pool their resources about a certain topic, such as pre-Confederation Canada, and each write a facet of the bigger topic. The end result would be each student contributing to the learning, taking responsibility for their facet, and learning from their peers the information they didn't find themselves.

There are, however, some downsides to blogging, and technology in general. Even for myself, with the use of computers proliferating to near-indispensable, I found my handwriting and spelling to have taken a downward turn; I can no longer write a paper by hand with greater ease than on a computer. Writing could become almost a lost art in the next few decades if we don't take steps to protect our non-technological scholastic heritage.

In order to preserve and pass down the fluent ability to write and spell without using a word processor or spell-check, I would first have the students write out by hand what they intended to post on the blog, whether it be a current event, journal, or some other class collaboration. Only once deemed at grade level grammatically and linguistically would I allow a student to post to the internet. This way, the written component can be combined with technology, and both aspects of the curriculum are fulfilled. Also, the privilege to use a computer would become a motivator to slug through the tedious handwritten portion.

There are many good applications for blogging, and it is an excellent (though not supreme) tool for expanding your classroom's limits; I cannot wait to try some out for myself.