Blogs as Teaching Tools

I believe that blogs have the potential to be very effective teaching tools. Blogs may be used in the classroom in many ways.
Teachers may use blogs to connect with their school community. Teachers may create posts about what the children are learning in class,which assignment and projects are due and when they are due, and information for field trips. Since parents may access this on their own time, they are not always having to rely on the student to bring notes home. Parents may also leave comments as a way to sound off on classroom events.
Students may use blogs to strengthen different skills that they have been taught in the classroom. Blogs can be used as creative writing tools or simply as a way to get students to practice spelling words. If students are required to type their spelling words as a blog post, they are getting to do something that they may consider mature while doing something that they may consider boring. When having to type their spelling words, students have to read the word from their textbook, spell the word as they type it out, and then reread the word for correctness. Students may blog about personal experiences or about things they have been learning about in class. Students may blog about the culture they are learning about in Social Studies, a cool fact they learned in Science, or something in Math that they just really don't understand. Students may also use blogs as a way to sound off about classroom events, just like the parents could.While teachers are concerned more with students' learning capabilities rather than their happiness, it is helpful to know if a student really doesn't like how some things are done so that they may can be accommodated for and may then begin to enjoy school and learning more.
I do believe that blogs are helpful tools in classrooms if they are used properly. Instead of doing a mass email to many people and then having to answer multiple replies to an email, the teacher can put the information online for others to see and respond to in a quick, easy way.