Online Collaborative Inquiry: Classroom Blogging Ventures and Multiple Literacies

The article written by Judy Arzt's titled Online Collabortive Inquiry: Classroom Blogging Ventures and Multiple Literacies is an informative atricle for teachers who are thinking about using blogging in the classroom. Arzt stated, "Blogging engages students in online conversations, design of multimodal compositions, opportunities to meet and collaborate with students from around the world, ways to reflect on classroom learning, and acquisition of digital citizenship etiquette. There is no denying we live in a global world. Whether students use blogging to reach this world by reading and commenting on other students’ blogs or by creating and maintaining their own blogs and inviting others into their world, they benefit from teacher guidance and support in venturing into these literacy endeavors. As teachers, we are the curriculum experts, and given the tools, we need to make them work in our classrooms to advance students’ reading, writing, and overall communication skills. We need to prepare students to be flexible writers, to understand how to write for different audiences and purposes, how to communicate effectively with multimodal tools, and what it means to share ideas online no matter how small or large the online outreach. Blogging is an ideal way to achieve many educational and literacy goals (pg 18)".

However, if we are going to have our students using blogs in our clasrrom, we need to teach them blog and computer safety.  These websites will be helpful to teach computer safety and resposibiliteies for blogging. Students need to know what our expectations for blogging.
http://tv.disney.go.com/disneychannel/commonsense/
http://educational-blogging.wikispaces.com/How+To+Teach+Commenting+Skills


I am new to this whole blogging "thing" and would want to take it slow with the students I work with.  One blog that was mentioned in the article was from a teacher that teaches in West Hartford, CT.  Her website  offered a nice way to introduce blogging while promoting lieteracy skills, such as, writing, reading, and communicating with our global community. Here is the website. http://ww2.sjc.edu/students/jecleary/KidBlog_Uses.htm  I can see myself using some of the ideas she mentioned on her website.