Blogging Across Borders

5th Grade Classroom in America

Blogs do not have to be shared just between teachers, students, and parents in one particular classroom. A blog could be used to communicate with a classroom in another state or even country! For example, the teacher and students of a classroom in Maine could create a blog that talks about current events in the United States, or what they are doing in their classroom, or about cultural topics.  The teacher could create a connection with a teacher in another country, Spain, for example, where that teacher's classroom of the same age-group would create a blog doing the same.  Thanks to technology, the blogs could be translated into the classrooms' respective languages OR the blog could be a resource for teaching students a new language.  At the same time, students would learn more about what is going on in the other country and become more familiar with another culture, hopefully dispersing the ethnocentricism that most students are bound to carry with them.  

5th Grade Classroom in Spain

Using a Classroom Blog to Get Feedback from Parents

It is important for parents to feel that they are able to communicate with the teacher about their children.  As a teacher, I could create a blog to be a sort of online forum; if I had a question about what parents thought about a certain topic I was about to teach, or if they wanted to weigh in their opinions about whether one form of lesson would be more meaningful than another (i.e. a field trip to the aquarium or a visit from a marine biologist), or if they wanted to sign up for volunteering in the classroom - all of these discussions could be achieved through a blog.  The blog would serve as a sort of public forum where the teacher could discuss ideas with parents and the parents would not actually all have to be altogether in the same place at once.  This would also serve as a way for the parents to get to know the teacher better, the teacher to get to know the parents better, and the parents to get to know each other better.  The blog would be useful not only because it would allow a large discussion without necessary attendance, but because it would also be a place to create community.  

Using A Classroom Blog Where Students are the Creators

Besides having a blog that I could use in my classroom to facilitate discussion, I would also use blogs as a way for students to express their own feelings, opinions, and ideas.  Many of the Maine Learning Results for writing are geared toward students' writing processes with the ultimate goal of it being polished and viewed by others.  If students feel that their work will be viewed by others, especially through publication, they will likely be much more motivated to create writing that is thoughtful, intelligent, and polished.  By encouraging the students to create their own blogs and update them periodically, the boring old process of writing in a notebook can be discarded and students will be introduced to the technological world.  Having a blog will also help their typing skills and general writing schools.  The link below is a kid-friendly blog site where students may go and begin publishing.

http://kidblog.org/home/