Blog We Must; The Question is Why?

Why in the world would I ever use a blog in my future classroom?
There are many reasons, but one of the biggest things that I love about blogging is the informality of it. Blogs can be, and many are, anonymous. I use my personal blog for things like ranting, explaining, cursing, exciting news, and just a place to decompress my daily life. So, for my own students, I would want to start them off blogging at the beginning of the class period. I think we forget how much we really ask of students during the day and allowing a small amount of time for them to release whatever is on their mind is very helpful. The nice thing about a blog is that anything can be “saved as a draft” and never read by anyone but the blog owner. Unlike “journals” that were popular when I was in school, there is no chance of anyone secretly reading your posts and telling your deepest darkest thoughts to the world. I love the privacy idea of a blog and it is totally different to me than having a document saved in a folder. At any point the student could click “publish” and drag that draft out of the archives. For me, being able to “publish” something is a really cool idea and it is something that I think my students would enjoy as well.

So why must we blog? To decompress our days; rant about our school lunch; gush about our crush that sits on the other side of the room, and to just plain write.