Technology Integration Article-September 16, 2010

I recently read the article Fifth Graders Soar In the Blogosphere by Cara Bafile. I found this article to be really interesting and inspiring as it talked about the importance and benefits of having a classroom blog. I loved that this article helped me to connect the ideas that we have talked about in class with other examples of teachers doing so in their classrooms around the world. Cara shared thoughts from a classroom teacher in California who came across blogging with her students when modifying her classroom website-another great idea. She developed ways to integrate blogging into the curriculum used and saw it as a great way to engage and excite her students about what they were learning. The teacher, Gillian Ryan, said that blogging helped to motivate and give purpose to her students learning, which is very important in today's society. All students need to have a purpose for their learning and a way to make it applicable to their everyday life. Blogging is one way to do so. I loved that in this article it also talked about how the students got so excited to share their thoughts and ideas with an audience more than Gillian herself. It was so amazing to see that she felt such a difference as a result of using blogging in her classroom and they way that students were able to feel like what they were doing was more "real-world" like, which is a point of view I had never considered before reading this article.