Blogs and Wikis in Education

The major use that blogs and wikis currently play in education are for professional development. Many blogs are created describing new uses for technology in the classroom, and attempting to help more traditional teachers to encoorporate more technology into their classrooms. However through my research I saw many new and interesting ways to use blogs and wikis in education. One interesting use for wikis was as a forum for discussion within a class. This particular wiki, welkerswikinomics.wetpaint.com, uses the wiki to encourage disscussion and participation for her economics class. She encourages many people to post to the wiki, but only requires her students to do this. I found this to be an interesting way to extend learning outside of the classroom. Another interesting idea for blog use in the classroom was the idea created at edublogs. This site provides a forum for teachers to facilitate online blogging for his/her students. While the students are able to post blogs and interact with the site, the teacher is the manager. This allows the students to use the site while parents need not worry about their children's online safety. I thought that this type of technology use would be a wonderful resource for teachers, esspecially of the younger grades as it allows students to publish their work but skeptical parents need not worry as much. The third interesting way in which blogs and wikis could be used in education was a blog created by Lewis Elementary. This site was run by the school, but contained important information from every class in addition to resources to be used by teachers and parents. I thought that this use of a blog was quite interesting as it allows parents to be even more involved in their children's education, while the teacher do not need to spend too much time updating their class information each day.
Another important technology tool that I looked at were RSS readers and Aggregators. These are quite nice, in that they update users to changes in blogs, websites and other online information. For teachers I could see this tool being quite useful. To start RSS readers and Aggregators could be used to keep updated on new technology tools for classroom use, or simply new imformation of teaching and learning. Also these could be quite useful for looking at new postings from students. It would be great to identify the new blogs that students are posting or to fix thinking errors before they become to engrained in students' knowledge by being quickly informed of changes to students blogs.
I believe that blogs and wikis could be quite useful in classrooms. They can facilitate online resources and encourage students to interact with eachother and to look at resources that can be found online. Also for students blogs can be quite interesting as it expands a child's idea of writing to be able to fully publish their work online. However among these benefits there are also drawbacks of using blogs and wikis in education. First, safety is an important issue. Students who become too comfortable with posting to the internet may make mistakes and forget about safety issues that can arise on the internet; the internet is not private. Also parents are likely to question the use of the internet in such ways in their children's classrooms as it is unknown to them in many ways. The second problem in using blogs in classes is that students, who love to use computers, may forget about other possible ways to publish work. It is important for students to understand the ways in which the internet can be a resource for them, but it is also important that students not forget about all the other opptions that they have that remain outside of the internet. It is my belief however, that with the proper education of internet safety and uses as well as adult monitoring of students' uses of blogs, these can become quite helpful and a wonderful resource for students and teachers.