Blogging is perhaps the easiest way to begin integrating technology into your daily routine. Essentially a web-based journaling system, blogging provides a communication forum that can be used as both a chronicle of classroom events and as a discussion forum for various concerns. For example, your class has recently received the results from a standardized test. You are so proud of their achievements in math, but concerned about reading comprehension. A blog presents a place where you can congratulate their hard work, but perhaps provide suggestions for additional activities to be done at home. Parents can quickly and easily comment on your suggestions, even inputting their own ideas. Your blog can also chronicle the daily events of your classroom, keeping parents easily involved.

Another great idea is to set up a blog for every student in your class. Rather than a spiral-bound journal that is quickly destroyed and often forgotten, a blog gives every student a voice. They can comment on others posts, giving valuable peer-feedback and helping to improve their own writing skills. Gloria J. Ladson-Billings, in an article entitled “I ain’t writin’ nuttin’: Permissions to Fail and Demands to Succeed in Urban Classrooms,” discusses what she calls “permission to fail.” She describes a scene in which a young girl refuses to write in her journal. The teacher’s response to this is, “That’s okay. Maybe you’ll feel like writing tomorrow.” With no incentive or impetus, this student is likely to go through life without ever exercising her rhetorical abilities. Ladson-Billings calls for a “culturally-relevant pedagogy,” and insists that reading and writing must be done for real purposes. Such teaching, she claims, “…is designed to help students move past a blaming the victim mentality and search for the structural and symbolic foundations of inequity and injustice.” What better way to empower and validate students than through a published journal that friends and family can easily access?

Finally, student blogging gives every child the ability to see what kind of work their peers are creating. What works? Whose journal was the most moving this week? Giving kids assignments in which they evaluate others blogs and the strengths and weaknesses therein improves everyone’s abilities.