blog appreciation...

Before the start of this class I never understood what a blog was let alone the variety of uses that they can have within the classroom. I personally am not in the classroom and do not have any subjects to test my new found technology on, but I can assure you that blog use will be something that is utilized within my personal classroom in one form or another. The administrative end of blog use is what I find to be the most interesting and the most useful. As an educator you would be able to keep your students and other educators current by posting up-coming events, classroom highlights, reminders, lunch menus, sport achievements, student awards, deadlines, and even pictures for them to easily share with the click of a button. At a more advanced level of sharing you could use a blog for your school, not just your classroom, in order to post new hirings, policy changes, introduce new members of your staff, post cancellations or even use your blog as a forum for advocacy.
I am not saying that I am opposed to using blogs in the classroom for your students, perhaps this is only because this is something that I have yet to be exposed to and would like to see it used before I attempt it myself. I could see it being most productive at the college level as a way to communicate between other classmates, professors or other administrators with questions or concerns. I feel that younger student might be unaware of the gravity of an open communication forum and use it in an inappropriate manner. There are evidently ways to monitor students as they use blogs through monitoring and consent forms, I could just see blogs being more of an issue when being used with younger students.
One website that I found really highlighted the benefits of the use of blogs within a school community http://www.schooltechleadership.org/storage/CASTLE_WhyBlogAsAnAdministrator.pdf and used great examples through the use of additional links that specifically detailed the examples that they were discussing. This was very useful to me as I am a visual person; you can tell me one thing, but I REALLY just need to see it in order to fully understand.