Week 6 #14 Technorati

I had absolutely no idea the blogging world was so widespread. I hear about blogging all the time, and there are a few that I blogs that I look at on a semi-regular basis, but I am astounded by what is out there. I know that blogging has been extremely big in the campaigns lately. It is also on the news stations, and they encourage you to go to their blogs. So I knew all this, but I guess I wasn't really paying attention as to how big it was. I was surprised at the photos and videos that were available from Technorati also.
Here are just a few tags that are popular today: apple, barak obama, china, economy, britney spears, gadgets, politics, iraq, microsoft.
What better way when your high school students are doing research on current events than to have them read some blogs. Think of the discussion you could have relating to bias, opinions, valid or invalid sources. Exposing students to some good blogs to read and discuss could help them to understand that they need to make sure they are using valid sources, and that anyone can post anything they wish on their blogs, but it doesn't necessarily make it true! Students today want their classes to relate and be revelant to where they are today. What a great tool to help them learn. Of course, there is always the APU and class curriculum guidelines to consider, but if your lessons were well planned out, and shared before hand, I think they could work. What a great opportunity for the school librarian to pair up with ELA, history, science, or any other course and help make it revelant to our students. I'm a little more leary about using blogs with grade 4-6, but if the right blog was available and the lesson was structured appropriately I might consider it. I sometimes worry that all the IMing and text messaging is the only way students are writing, but just looking at some of the blog postings made me see that almost everyone that is blogging is good at writing. This leads me to believe that students would write well because it was going to be meaningful and others were going to read it. This would be relevant to them. A great learning tool when used well.
ssn