Blah to Blog

In my last post, I was struck by how people rush around these days. There is no time for direct conversations anymore because social media is taking the society by storm, which leads me to writing this post.

Many people use a blog today as an online journal because there is no one listening to them.

Since the Web is full of people searching for themselves, they find it consoling to pour out their feelings to an anonymous audience. Apparently, it's very gratifying when an anonymous person leaves a comment of sympathy to one of your posts. 

In graduate class, our professor used Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts to inform us about the general use of blogs. As she was discussing the many uses of blogs and how we could incorporate it into our own classrooms, I was struck by the fact that our students could use this to blog across the school.

Much like getting a letter from a pen pal, a blog could be about anything and given the right guidance in using this tool, students could talk about anything they want and have other students in the school give feedback to each other. Students would be more engaged to write if they knew that other students in the school and even the staff would write comments about their posts.

The Blah nonsense that students talk about could be used in their blogs as building blocks in their writing. As I thought about all the creative uses for a blog in a classroom, I was overwhelmed by the ideas flowing into my head. 

As Will Robinson said in his wiki, these are challenging times for educators:

"We are entering a time of deeply personalized, passion based learning. The amount of information is overwhelming. More and more, the expectation is to create, not consume, yet we're not creators."