Blogging as a Pedagogical Tool

When I first think of a person blogging I think of it being a tool to write down crazy ideas and a way for people to express themselves. I have honestly never looked at blogging as a pedagogical tool. I have to say that after looking through a few websites on the internet about incorporating the blog into the classroom, it seems like a very positive thing to me. With that everything that has positives also has negative sides to it as well.
From the few websites that I looked through about blogging they showed me that blogging can have its advantages in the classroom. From looking at the web page called “Blogs in School” it showed that blogging can bring a sense of community to the class as a whole. Everyone in the class would be able to share their own thoughts about a subject and even the kids that are shy in class are able to get their voice out on a blog. The kids are also able to give each other feedback on each other along with the teacher. This promotes learning from each other and not just the adult in the classroom. I believe that this type of learning if implemented the right way, being that the feedback from other classmates would not always be negative, would over all make the children more excited about learning. From the site about blogging in elementary classrooms I found a very valid point which stated that a blogging site for the children would help the students become better writers. This thought is because the kids do not want their classmates to think that they are bad writers, so in turn the students try harder and do a better more complete job when writing these blogs because they know that everyone is going to have access to them.
The only negative thoughts I have about using blogging as a teaching tool is where and how the sites are used in the classroom. When I say where, I mean what sites the teachers are using to do this blogging activity in class. It is the teacher’s responsibility that these students are not accessible to the entire world through this blogging. I think that it should be some sort of private site that the teacher would set up so that it was just their particular class that had access to the blogging site. If the sites were not private in some sort of way I could see blogging as a negative tool in the classroom. Furthermore, how the sites are used is very important as well. A teacher could turn this into a very negative learning tool by using it too often, I believe. The student teacher interaction in the classroom is still very important in my eyes. Bottom line is I don’t think that a teacher should become too lazy and do all of their work through blogging, some subjects are still meant to be taught is a traditional type learning way.