Using Blogs in the Classroom

    As a K-12 English Language Specialist whose teaching assignment varies from year-to-year, I would have to be creative with the ways in which I utilize blogs in my classroom.  Since my current teaching context is in the K-6 setting, I will mainly focus this post on that for fear of the longest blog post detailing all the possible ways I could use it in the classroom/as an educator.

    It would probably be best for me to use it as an electronic newsletter of sorts, and in a perfect world, would love to use it as a means to communicate with parents visually what we are doing in the classroom.  I could see this as possibly being monumental for many of my students' families since many of them want to know how else they can help their child(ren).  Visually showing them what we are doing can provide insight and spark ideas for ways in which they can help their children.  It can also put a visual to what is mentioned in parent meetings and conferences.  I would have to keep posts relatively succinct and mainly visual since there is a wide spectrum of language proficiencies with all of my parents.  I would also have to keep separate blogs for the separate schools, as I am sure that a parent in one school is not concerned about the goings-on in the other.  It would also be a lot to manage having K-6 and updating for each grade daily (or I could update on a schedule per grade).

    Fear is the biggest barrier that stands between me and using blogs (in this way) in the classroom.  I would constantly be worried about how my posts are going to be interpreted, by families, supervisors, administrators, etc.  I think this anxiety in and of itself would prevent me from creating a using a blog in this fashion.

Comments

  1. The mama bearerMarch 19, 2021 at 3:04 AM

    I had not considered using a blog to communicate with parents. The caution I would have is making it private so that only parents would have access to the information since photos of the students would be shared. The benefits to having a direct way to share pictures and even additional resources for families to use would great. This may be an avenue of communication I should explore.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KrystalMarch 20, 2021 at 8:11 PM

      Thanks, mama bearer, and thank you for the advice about making it private. I was thinking along those lines but never articulated that. I had also considered not putting photos with student faces, but just photos of students doing the work (masks cover most of their faces anyway), or photos of student work/word displays, etc.

      Delete
  2. Mrs. JonesMarch 20, 2021 at 7:45 PM

    Mrs. English,

    I admire your thoughtfulness in strategizing the best ways to communicate with parents. Being mindful of the home language preference and level of those living in the student's home is key to effective connections. When communicating with important people in the student's life, the first thought should be who am I talking to, and then what do we need to talk about. Communicating visually is a fantastic avenue! Pictures can transcend language and bring clarity, details, and an emotional connection to your words.

    Great thoughts on this topic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KrystalMarch 20, 2021 at 8:15 PM

      Thanks, Mrs. Jones! This was something that came to mind instantly when thinking about how to use blogs in my classroom (my instinct was to write them off), since currently, families are bombarded with emails that are verbose and probably take a long time to translate. I figured this would be another way for families and their child(ren) to be able to have conversations about what was done in school. Additionally, as I was reading your response, I also realized that I could add video components as well (not necessarily of the students but of me, perhaps) explaining what is going on.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Technology to Communicate with Students and Parents

  Using technology as a means of communication with my students' families has been of utmost importance, even pre-pandemic. Due to the advancement of technology, most of my students' families prefer electronic forms of communication to paper, phone call, or in-person. Since the majority of my students' families are non-native English speakers, they have voiced that the electronic means of communication are preferred because they can more easily get these messages translated. Translation apps such as Google Translate and the like are simply tools and are not reliable, so this is both a strength and a weakness of digital communication; however, this is the technology on which what many of my families rely. I have personally found TalkingPoints to be another effective app for communication, but have never tried it for larger pieces of information that need to be communicated. A major strength of digital communication is the ease with which to communicate. With smart
Read more

Personalized Learning

      It was always important for educators to be familiar with accessibility features on the technology available to them, but the reality of pandemic teaching is that it has exposed the disparities in communities and learners with accessibility.  Just a short 10 years ago, much of the assistive technology that was and has been available to learners is free (e.g. voice-to-text features, audio/read aloud features/closed captioning) .  From personal observation, it seems as though when many educators think of technology our minds immediately question, "How much does it cost?"  As pointed out in one of our course videos, there is a lot of existing, free technology available (Logan, 6.1).  The free label should be an important incentive for educators to explore what is available.     As an ELD Specialist (whose district does not have a budget for us), who also teaches students with IEPs, I have by necessity always explored the free options first.  Before elaborating more on that
Read more

Using Specialized Search Tools: Google Scholar

    In Google Scholar, the features on the left side are search for articles under "Any time" (to search by year, with the option to customize the range), "sort by relevance" (date), include, patents, and include citations.  The feature on the right side are "My profile" and "my library."  The feature on the left are more self explanatory:  being able to filter results based on date and year, or to customize the year of publication for resources.  The "my profile" and "my library" features are not as self-explanatory, but when utilized, can help make the researching process occur much more smoothly.   "My profile" is for individuals who may have articles/publications that they want tracked.  "My library" is helpful when researching different articles and an individual clicks on the star icon to save it to their library.  This is essentially akin to bookmarking, and so it allows the user to then reference al
Read more