Thing 1

I am participating in 8 Things for two reasons. The most selfish reason is to get my staff development credit so that I can have a comp day. 8 Things gives me the power to do this while I am at home and don’t need to pay for a sitter. The second reason is because the 8 things seemed pretty interesting. I am stuck in a strange place by my age. I am young enough to be expected to know many of the new technologies and old enough to have strong opinions about the downfalls of some of the technologies. While I love the instant access to information and communication, I think that technology has the potential to limit social skills and to limit the ability for people to plan, organize, and think on their feet. Everything has benefits and drawbacks. I hope that some of my strong opinions will be changed when I understand the technology better. I hope to learn enough to keep up with my young students as well as my own personal children. I also hope to use some of this new technology to help me gain teaching time for the red headed stepchild of elementary education – social studies.

During thing one I didn’t really have any revelations about the blog itself but rather on how I could use it. I see it as an incredible way to extend my social studies class into current events discussions or into a way for students to reflect on the social studies topics we are covering. This will only really benefit the kids who have access to the blog at home or the willingness to access the blog at the library. Not all students will be motivated or have access so I couldn’t make it worth a grade. However, I see this as a way to talk about s.s. more since we will only have about 25 – 30 minutes for the subject during the school day. I would like to explore adding video to my s.s. blog from different sites like History Channel or something.

I liked the hobo teacher blog because it was cute and pretty entertaining to read. I don’t know that I got much out of it other than a chuckle. If I have free time to read it I might go back to it but one of the dangers of this type of technology is the potential to waste time. I would be easily side tracked and I doubt I would search the internet just to find a blog about funny teaching stories. I would most likely look for a blog that gave me information that I could use. The blog about Room Eight is a cute idea. In fact, I had kids in my class this last year who took it upon themselves to create a class newspaper. I let them do it but did not really direct it. They assigned roles and gave their own deadlines. It would be fun to offer them a way to do the same thing on line. However, it seems like not everyone would get to participate due to lack of internet access on the part of some kids. All kids could participate in the pencil and paper variety. I would also be concerned that they might feel a little more anonymous on the internet and they might abuse it a little. If the teacher took the time to do it and keep everything nice and appropriate, that is one thing. However, to have a class newspaper blog without having the teacher do all of the moderating would not be wise. The kinderblog was fun to read since my youngest just finished kindergarten. I would have logged on to see what was going on in her class if they had a blog. However, I can only imagine the intense amount of time the teacher had to put in just to get the blog going. I’m not sure I would invest my time in that way. Things like this are fun to read but may not be so fun to create and maintain.


My opinions about writing on the internet are very conflicted. I think that writing for an audience is really important but this type of writing does not allow you to pick your audience – the audience picks you. If I were interested in reading a blog about Chihuahuas I could look it up and pick which one I wanted to read. I could choose a blog. As a consumer, I have the power to pass over the blogs that are not interesting to me or the ones that seem to be of less quality. For this reason, it is important to have good stuff on your blog so that people will choose yours. However, as a reader of the blog I really have no idea if the blog posts I am reading are junk or really good. I honestly believe that I will be more of a blog reader than a blog creator in my future because I don’t feel like I have something important enough to say that I need the internet to be my audience. I have plenty to say to people who ask me questions based on the fact that they KNOW that I have particular strengths, but I don’t have anything to say to random people who don’t know me or really know if what I am saying is valid. As far as student writing goes. Writing for an audience might make them think before they write but it doesn’t teach them the power of well planned text. Writing certain information for a specific topic is academically different from writing your opinion about your favorite subject. Even after this reflection, I am still conflicted about whether I think this type of writing is good for learning or bad. The jury is still out.

As I mentioned above, I think that this would be great to use in social studies to discuss current events or citizenship. I can see using this some day to discuss things about social studies that are not necessarily TEKS and can’t be covered in class. I think it would be fun to have a post that is linked to History Channel to let kids view the clips about “This Day In History”. I can see opening a discussion about a controversial subject and blogging about it. This is sort of like an on line journal. In fact, I might see this as a way to get kids to journal without my taking home a lot of paper. The kids who can blog a journal can get credit but the kids without access to the blog can journal on paper. It is at least versatile in that way.