blogging for kids
For the Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, Joseph Friedhoff wrote and interesting article titled “Reflecting on the affordances and constraints of technologies and their impact on pedagogical goals”. Although the article primarily dealt with using blogs as a teaching/learning tool in tertiary education courses for preservice teachers, many of the points raised about the value of using blogs in classrooms could also relate to primary school students. According to Friedhoff, tools such as blogs should ideally facilitate collaboration and communication between classmates. Unlike discussion boards, they also mean that an individual’s work is compiled together in chronological order. In a primary classroom, this could be an alternate way for students to record their thoughts like a journal, or in a more formal task relating to a particular KLA.
Having become quite familiar with writing and reading blogs over the last semester, I believe that if the technology were available to students, many stage 3 students would be capable of writing and maintaining a blog of their own, with guidance from their teacher. However unlike Friedhoff I believe that blogs would not be as effective in encouraging collaborative work amongst primary students–a tool better suited to this task would be something like a joint class blog or a wikispace. Therefore I believe that blogs could be useful in the primary classroom as a journal-like tool for students to record responses and reflections in an online medium.
