Blogging in the classroom ? My doubts....

As we all now know twittering, blogging,skyping,facebooking,poking and what not is now possible through social networking sites and is the right and promising move for the future. I myself is highly interested in Twittering and Blogging and have been doing it for over 2 years now.

But now in a classroom teaching in a classroom which has Internet and WI-FI through out the school, I am interested in promoting the idea of blogging to my 2nd year class. They are a good interested and keen class to work with and I think and want to show them in early life (unlike me) at the possibilities of blogging and sharing to the world.A blog is a Web publishing tool that allows authors like myself and my other fellow students to quickly and easily self-publish text, artwork, links to other blogs or Web sites, and a whole array of other content.

Blogs have one standard characteristic, however: the posting. Blog postings are text entries, similar to a diary or journal, which include a posting date and may include comments by people other than the author, photos, links, or other digital media.Postings are often short and frequently updated. They appear in reverse chronological order and can include archived entries.

Although Blogs are great and all for the future and easier also to find information for research during my days as an art student, I really do have my concerns about blogging in the classroom environment. Just doing a google search earlier on, I googled 'school blogs' and was shocked to see American kindergartens blogs, these blogs where fun,bright educational and had images of kids doing assignments and making creative projects all clearly documented for the world to see. I am all for pro education and the use of ICT as it interests me a lot.

But on further investigation through the blog, I saw kids names, pictures of them in class and such. I began to wonder was it ethic of the teacher to show these images and give out personal information such as names on the blog which is exposed to the whole world. Fair enough one can make a blog private like this, but I began to worry about the horror stories we hear today about identities being exposed on the Internet, I feel that kids as young as 6 and 7 are too young to be informed and exposed to blogging and such other Internet related things.

I plan to look into the possibilities of setting up a CSN Blog for my art class maybe getting pupils to write up personal accounts of what they learnt and found interesting in one of the lessons/activities we did in the past, again I must run it past to see am I allowed. I would also like to post images of pupils work and artists we look at through out the school year. I will make this blog a personal and private one for the pupils and I to access it, again depending on time and other classroom activities and time management I would like to think I could do this. I want to promote the pupils work and learning's and make pupils see how blogging can make a difference.

The below website is a great website for the beginner in blogging and twittering.

www.classroomblogging.com