Pros and Cons of Blogging

For this assignment, I decided to read all of Kristen Younce's blog posts. Everyone in the class had the same blog assignments, so it was really interesting to see the opinions of other students in the class. Kristen and I expressed many of the same ideas in most of the blog posts that we wrote this semester. We both agree that technology has come a long way over the past few years, and we are looking forward to using this technology in the classroom when we become teachers. There are many different forms of technology now available in most classrooms (i.e. class blogs, class websites, podcasts, videoconferencing, etc.). I think that it will be absolutely wonderful to see how all of these new forms of technology help teachers suit the many different learning styles of the students in their classroom.


After reading through all of my blog posts again and reading through Kristen's, I really noticed many pros associated with using class blogs as a future teacher. A major pro of classroom blogs is the ability to communicate with parents and/or guardians and students outside of the classroom. One of our blog assignments this semester was to view two United States teacher blogs and two international blogs. Through looking at these teachers blogs, I saw many posts that incorporated important information that students and parents could view from home. Some information that teachers included in their blogs were class and homework assignments, pictures and videos of activities taking place in the classroom, information about honor roll students and students who had received special awards, etc. All of these things are great things for parents and students to be able to view from home. Classroom blogs give parents the opportunity to comment and give feed back on blog posts which allows teachers and parents to have constant communication with each other about all of the different activities taking place in the classroom.


Another one of the major pros of having a class blog is having the ability to contact other schools in the United States or internationally. One blog that I looked at in the United States (Mr. C's class blog from Noel, Missouri) connected with a class blog in Canada (Mr. Lamshed's class). Both Mr. C and Mr. Lamshed's classes were reading the book Holes. Mr. Lamshed had posted three reflection questions on chapters one through seven, so Mr. C made it an assignment for the children in his classroom to access Mr. Lamshed's blog and post a comment relating to one of the three reflection questions. In my opinion this is a great plus of using blogs because it helped these students connect across the world. The last major pro of blogging that I really see would just be its use of technology in the classroom. Through having a class blog, teachers are able to allow their students to experiment with one of the major new technologies being used all across the world. Because technology is becoming a much bigger part of the world everyday, it is very important for students to learn how to use and be familiar with the many different forms of technology that they are probably going to be able to use for the rest of their lives.

Through reading all of my blog posts, I also recognized some of the cons associated with using blogs in the classroom. One of my major concerns as a future teacher is that some students and parents will not have access to the blog at home. If blogs are used for completing homework assignments, some students will not be able to complete the assignments due to not having an Internet connection available at home. Also, parents will not have the same opportunity as other parents to view pictures of the class activities and projects or information about student achievement awards. As a teacher, I guess the solution to this problem would be making some form of alternate arrangements for these students and parents who do not have the available connection to the Internet.

Overall if I had to weigh the pros and the cons, I would definitely say that blogs would be very useful in all classrooms. They provide great information and are a great form of communication with many different people outside of the classroom.