Response to Blog On

After reading Poling's article, "Blog On: Building Communication and Collaboration among Staff and Students", I am excited about starting a classroom blog for my students. I use the Reader's Workshop model in my classroom, so my students respond to their reading in a Reader's Notebook. They write me a letter about what they have read and the connections they made while reading, "fix-up" strategies used, predictions, and unanswered questions about the text. In return, I write a response to the student about their letter and ask additional questions and comment on their ideas and thoughts. As much as I enjoy having this connection with each student, having a class blog would improve the learning taking place because students could comment on each other's writing and have a broader audience.
In the text, the author provides examples of students commenting on each other's posts and sharing their ideas for using "fix-up" strategies. I think those conversations would provide invaluable feedback for the students. They could see how other students process information and text and a variety of strategies work. I also think the use of blogs with Reader's Workshop would provide more excitement as the author suggested. My students love to use the computer and I think this would provide a wonderful authentic writing opportunity for students. I foresee students being more excited about responding to their text and sharing ideas with each other-just as I am more excited about responding to this article in a blog format than as a one-pager.
One area in which I see parental resistance to the blogging idea is because of safety. I like how the author's students used initials for this reason. Even though I would encourage my students to use initials while blogging, I am curious about the wariness of parents. By providing the parents with information about the benefits of blogging, such as this article, and my intention of protecting the identity of the students, hopefully I can convince parents that blogging is a wonderful addition to our classroom.