Evaluating Educational Blogs

Blog that Works:
Kindergarten Tales
This is a blog for a Kindergarten class, created by two teachers who teach the class together. The teachers keep the layout of the blog season oriented, so right now it features birds, flowers and spring colors. The header is rather large, but it works for the theme of the blog. There is a lot of student work featured in the blog, which is exciting for students as well as parents to see. This blog provides ideas for learning outside of the classroom through other technology venues such as apps for iPads and iPods. Students helping and working with other students are featured in videos in this blog, and  there are numerous pictures of children doing activities in the classroom. There are even stories on the blog that children can go to and read just as if they were reading the actual book. The children are encouraged to make their own books using a website provided on the blog, and are then able to share them with their classmates.

Blog That Needs Work:
TEAM TOA-Shanghai American School, Pudong, Third Grade Blog
This is a blog for a third grade class, yet the amount of information crammed into the blog is overwhelming even to me as a college student. It looks like a fairly decent blog when first arriving at the page with a picture of the students in the class and only a few colors, but upon scrolling down, I couldn't handle all of the information being thrown at me. The fonts are all different sizes and colors, and there is so much information in the sidebars that your eyes never get a break. There are clocks on the left side of the page which display the "times around the world," which I don't feel is necessary in the first place, but the times are not even accurate. There are pictures showing students in the classroom which is nice, but they are all crammed together so that you don't really get a chance to see each individual photo. They are also all the same photo, the only difference being the student featured in it. I enjoy seeing pictures of what is going on in the classroom, but in this case, there needs to be a more vast assortment of activities going on in the pictures, and they need to be spread out throughout the blog a lot more. Overall this blog is just very overwhelming. It may have great information, but finding it and knowing what is important is very difficult.

Wordle: Digital Divide

Set Two Questions:

1.) Is it important for all people to have access to the Internet? Why or why not?

2.) Will eliminating the digital divide create new global, national, and/or local social problems?

3.) What might these new problems be?

E-Sponsibility

If teachers are friends with their students on social networks such as facebook, their private lives as displayed online absolutely should be scrutinized. When the teachers allow their students to see what goes on in their lives outside of the classroom, everything they see should be age appropriate for all students. If a teacher has photos in which substances such as alcohol are visible, they should not be viewable by their students. It is one of a teacher's many responsibilities to protect his or her students from negative influences whenever possible. Teachers should be role models for their students, and allowing students to see inappropriate material sets a bad example. Where the line should be drawn seems to be the biggest question involving this issue. Many cases of school boards attempting to fire teachers over pictures found on the internet involve a single glass of wine or a beer on the table in the picture. Photographs such as these are not legitimate reasons for a teacher to lose his or her job. A teacher who is of age and has posted a picture of herself drinking a glass of wine on vacation in Italy does not deserve to lose her teaching license for any reason presented in the photograph. If this same teacher posted a photograph of herself belligerently drunk and dancing on a table during her vacation in Italy, I could see the school board having a case to go off of. Even if the teacher did have this picture on her facebook though, if she was an excellent teacher and her students had no way of seeing the picture, I would still have a hard time saying she should be fired. If the teacher is responsible enough to keep her personal life separate from her work life and continue to excel in her work, there is no real reason why she should lose her job.

As long as a teacher can be responsible about what he or she posts on social networking sites there should not be a problem. I don't feel that it is necessary for teachers to be "friends" with their students on facebook, especially when websites such as Edmodo are available for their use. When I become a teacher, I will not have any pictures that could be used against me in my career, nor will I allow my personal life to be put on display for my students. I will keep my personal life and career completely separate as I believe they should be. I do not want to take the risk of being fired over having a glass of wine after a rough day at work, so I will not put myself at risk for that. Especially now that teachers know the risks of putting photos involving alcohol on the internet for others to see, they should really reconsider posting them at all. Is showing the world something like a picture of yourself drinking a margarita in Mexico really worth your job? I think not. If you are really dying for your friends to see those pictures, why not invite them over to your house and show them in person? It seems silly to me that a teacher can lose his or her job over something so innocent, yet it is just not worth the risk to put it out on the internet for everyone to see.