Blogging in the classroom part 2

The following reference talks about blogging and how it promotes literacy in the classroom. Huffaker, D. (2005). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom. AACE Journal, 13(2), 91-98. Blogging allows students to be creative and to express themselves. Blogging can be individualistic or collaborative. It can be used in a variety of classes and used with different age groups. Even elementary students are able to learn how to blog. For teachers it can allow you to reflect, plan, mentor, analyze, and communicate with a variety  of people (students, parents, co-workers, etc...). The following link has 8 rules to apply blogging to a science classroom: http://spu.mattjonesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/blogs-applications-in-science-education.pdf. I would be able to use blogging in any of my classes that I teach. I can have all the information for a specific class on a blog including assignments, class description, and contact information. I can create a unit and have my students blog a response, take a poll, watch a video, and I am sure many other things. The one thing that teachers do have to be careful of is that students use security settings to protect themselves and that they are appropriate in what they blog since other classmates will be reading it. An example of a unit that I could have my students do would be to split the class into groups and have them create a blog on ecosystems. Each group would have to describe one ecosystem. They would have to find out what an ecosystem is, find a picture of their ecosystem, and pretend they were creating this blog for someone who knew nothing about ecosystems. When the blogs are done being created, the groups will have to visit all of the blog sites and respond to the blog. They will have to come up with 2 questions. When the project is done we will go over of the questions in class. This is just one example on how a blog can be used in class. I could have a cell unit for Biology and have my students do a blog on cells. The list goes on and on.