Blogging Buddies Teaching Each Other

I was amazed how the grade 1 students took to blogging and the way they were able to improve their writing. I also found it interesting, that the pre-service students were learning skills that they may not have realized they were learning. The grade 1 students were learning about using a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and a period at the end of the sentence. They were also learning about spaces and the proper spelling of words. The grade 1 students gained self-esteem, by having someone who would take the time to not only read their blogs but also responded to them. I believe this experience helped the pre-service students to have a better understanding of what it might be like actually being in a classroom. Of course blogging is not exactly like being in the classroom, since they dealt with only one student, but it would have to have some impact on their perception of how they can be influential to a student.



I find it ironic that I am writing about blogging when I grew up in a time when computers were such a new concept. I was born shortly after the first computers was invented. Throughout my childhood, talk of computers was about big, huge machines. During my teenage years, I heard about a computer that was a block long, a block wide, and three stories high that was so powerful that it could hold the personal information of everyone in the world, it was supposedly called “The Beast”. Shortly after that, I heard about another one called “The Prophet”. The computers of my day were generally for the military. Computers were gradually moving into the business sector. We have moved from monstrous mainframes to game systems to personal computers, (desktops) to laptops, i-pods, i-phones, and a wide variety of personal communications. This also includes the World Wide Web. I would have loved having the opportunity to use this technology.

I could see the advantage of having blogging buddies incorporated into the classroom. It would benefit the grade school students as well as pre-service students. It might help the teacher with seeing new ways of getting a point across. However, I would need to make sure that none of the blogging resulted in a negative or adverse feeling for my student. I really like the character and self-estem potential, I now see, this could have for my students when I become the teacher.