All the World’s a Stage: Teaching Through Online Journals
This article by Sarah Fallon was useful to my particular topic of Blogs in K-6 Education as it discussed how one could use blogs in their classrooms. It provided examples of how blogs had been used in a classroom.
What impacted me most from this article was the example that was given where a Yr 11 Journalisim class from New Jersey worked with a year 4 and 5 class in Georgia. I was really interested in this as i had not thought of this as being a possiblity. In the example given, the year 11 class mentored the the younger classes. The classes communicated through their blogs. The younger students were intimidated by this at first as they felt as though their work would not be good enough for the older kids and were worried about what they would think. However, their teacher encoureged them and as they went on they enjoyed the experience, as it provioded them with an audience for thier work, other than their teacher. The teacher then took this further and gor parents and senior citizens from the community involved in the students writing.
The students benefitted greatly from this experience, as blogging allowed them to communicate with a group of people that they would not normally have had access to. The students also had motivation to take extra care in their work, as they had to share it with people they were unfamiliar with and their teacher claimed that they took more care with their work as they wanted to impress their older students by showing them that they could produce good quality work.
Overall, i found this article to be quite inspiring as it showed the benefits of blogging, other than the development of computer skills and ability to share work with their classmates. Through blogging, students can share their work with varying groups from across the globe and in turn, this can often motivate them to push themselves further, and take more care in their work, so that they can share work of a high quality.
