Blog to the world

Earlier in the semester, we talked about the benefits of blogs within our classrooms, from keeping in touch with out students, allowing them to reflect, ask questions, and so forth. However, as educators, blogs can serve another purpose to us.

In the article, "Live From Small Town America: Teachers Who Blog To Stay In Touch," teachers from small towns talked about how they used their blogs to publicize the events within their classrooms because, unlike in inner-cities, they do not have news or radio stations nearby that can give them the spotlight when they do something of note. This interested me because I run a small blog, and it does always surprise me when I can gain knowledge about an event or movement in another part of the country that the mass media has not yet acknowledged. 

Additionally, it allows teachers to communicate with each other. By running personal blogs, educators can learn of new things from each other, be it new technologies, apps, websites, or strategies. Often, these kinds of things wouldn't be handed down by administrators unless mandated. I think it might be beneficial for a website to exist for educators only to blog about things like technology or new apps they discover, so its easily accessible for other teachers of their same discipline and grade level. When I was searching for social studies blogs by teachers, it took me a while to come up with one that I thought had a substantial amount of information. Meanwhile, having a domain for educators to collaborate together on the topic would make things like that much easier to locate.

The small town teachers acknowledge that many of the blogs are written by teachers in the suburbs or inner cities, giving them a different atmosphere. The many kinds of teachers writing many kinds of blogs, though, gives us much to learn.