Antenille's Blog About Blogs

For years I have honestly wondered what the deal was about blogs.  For me, it was redundancy.  People on facebook create their statuses, discussion boards are created in courses, twitter allows others to see what you're doing.  This is TOO much!  
No one has ever given me an answer about blogs that I was satisfied with and besides, I didn't want anyone to know every single thing about what I was thinking, what I was doing, and what is going on in my life. Those things are reserved for important people in my life.  Today, I learned something new.  After watching the YouTube video on blogging, I now understand the value of blogs, especially in the classroom.  From my understanding, blogs or formally, web logs, are posts (allowed to be longer) that we publish that focuses on important events and movements, not necessarily from my life, but from my interests.  Newspapers are very selective about the articles they write and print, blogs make it possible for people from everywhere to communicate about everything, especially common interests.  I watched a documentary on Netflix (I forgot the title) about this "average Joe" Chinese man who blogged about the tyranny of China's communism.  He not only wrote about the discrimination and human rights violation of his people, he uploaded videos to support his claims.  The government tried to stop him.  He was invited to Germany as a guest panelist on their Blogger Conference, but was detained in China by the government.  His blogs made him famous.
"Being an expert is not talking about yourself," (Patel 2012).  This is exactly the reason why the Chinese blogger became famous.  He did not blog about his miseries, he blogged about his people's and with this, sought the assistance of world leaders.  He was recognized by many people from around the world for his noble deeds.  The end of the film shows him leading other bloggers into the movement of revealing to the rest of the world the suffering that their government is inflicting on its people.
I can definitely use blogging by connecting course topics to student thoughts, but that becomes tedious for them.  Instead, what I would really want to see happen at our school is to for the us teachers to begin blogging about strategies that work, what we're having issues with, and new information that may help our school run more effectively, etc.  I see the communication with teachers is very limited because of all the tasks we have to do.  By having a blog, we can all be actively connected to our school and each other as we are a team.  A setback of blogging could be grammar and punctuation issues.  Also, some teachers (like myself at first) may need convincing or training to use blogs.  I think the motivation and consistency might be problem as well.  With students, they may become too distracted with blogging.  It's a little daunting to think because if we are going to do this, each teacher as about 90 students all together and having to read and organize all blogger's posts will take up more time than is necessary or productive.  According to Backbencher 2013, three drawbacks of blogging are that everyone in the world could see your post which opens you up to much criticism and insult which leads to low self-confidence, and lastly, more pressure to post blogs if people are interested in what you write.  It may seem ridiculous for the latter to be a negative, but this will eventually take up more of your time.
I think blogging would be excellent in class, but I still need to research on how to make it effective.