Blogging

Welcome to my adventures in learning Web 2.0 tools. This post is about blogging in education. First I would like to say that I never realized how much information is available on different blogs. I searched for music education sites and found a large amount of blogs and therefore, ideas to use in the classroom. I even found blogs on teaching private piano. I will definitely be looking a little bit closer at these blogs in the future.

Researching about blogs has shown me that here is a great way to have our students interact with reading and writing. I am not sure that I will have my elementary instrumental lesson students participate in blogs at this time mainly due to the fact that we will not have time to do it during school lessons. I can see for the classroom teacher the possibilities are endless.

One problem I see with the use of blogs is if the blogs will be available for the students and teacher to access at school. The filters on school Internet block most of the blogging and social media sites that teachers want to access for use by their students. To create blogs, teachers will have to find blogging programs that bypass these filters. One site that I have read that other teachers are able to use is Edmodo. I will have to look into this program in my district.

If I did decide to use a blog in my lessons, I would post questions for students to respond to about how to do something on their instrument. For example, one question would be: When you see rit. in your music, what does that mean you are to do as you are playing this piece? Being able to describe what is needed in the music will tell me if a student understands the musical concept. This lesson will meet the following NET-S: 2. Communication and Collaboration.