Students & Blogging

It seems like everytime I turn around, there's a new way to communicate being invented. It was like that in the Army, when I saw the transition from radios to computers as the primary means of communication (to this day there really are no secure cell phones). Now the technology is so pervasive and transitioning so quickly, you can't avoid it. All communication with students used to happen in the classroom. If they missed a class, they had to wait until the next time the class met in order to catch up. That is no longer the case.

Even e-mail is becoming passe'. Now if you want information quickly, you have to master the art of blogging. Simple enough: start a blog page (as I've obviously done, since you're reading this now), pick a topic, and begin your rant. The main difference with blogging and e-mailing is that the blog gives you a broader audience, which is ideal if you want 30 students to have access to what's on your mind at any given time.

My wife (another teacher/glutton for punishment) started her blog over a year ago when I was deployed overseas. Thousands of miles from home, I used to read the blogs she wrote for her class just to experience what was going on in her life when I didn't have a letter from home to read. True, it wasn't the same as a love letter, but it was still her words and that was good enough. Here's her site: http://www.dcallender.blogspot.com/
As you can see, she uses it primarily to communicate what's going on in her class to students, but it also serves to communicate with parents. She's obviously learned that accountability is a double-edged sword: students don't always tell their parents what they have to do for homework or what they did in class. She has given forgetful students a second chance to check for assignments, and parents a chance to confirm or deny their child's claims that they have no homework. Before the blog, she was often forced to play "student said/teacher said". That is no longer an issue. I'll use mine the same way, although my site will not be quite so pink.

So that's the teacher's take on how to use blogs. Students will obviously read it, and post any questions that they and other students might have. Since I'm an SGA sponsor, I'm constantly deluged with e-mails, even during the summer. I'll probably suggest that the SGA officers start a blog page so we can relieve our e-mail in-boxes from some of the ongoing e-conversations that have plagued us this past year. I might begin to take a more passive role in the communications with the officers: I can supervise and chime in when guidance is needed, but the students can handle the rest through blogging.