As a student in an elementary education teaching program, I can see many advantages of having students use blogs as detailed in Diane Penrod’s Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy. Not only can a blog offer an authentic writing experience, but it can also help students take responsibility for the information they are posting and become more involved as others respond to their blogs. Blogs also offer a multi-media approach to presenting information which is something that children are highly attuned to, unlike many adults. And, blogs offer writing opportunities to children with different intelligences, modalities and special needs who may not be able to truly express what they think and know within a more traditional writing context.
But as a parent of young teenagers, the openness of the internet is a concern for me. There are predators out there looking for children and no matter how many times a parent or teacher warns children about the dangers of revealing too much personal information, teens think they are invincible. A study by Georgetown University’s Children’s Digital Media Center showed that children post a great deal of personal information on the internet. To mitigate the risk, the blogs either need to be locked down so they are only accessible by parents, classmates, and teachers or screened before they are posted to ensure no personal information is revealed. However, neither of these security measures prevents a student from creating a blog outside of the classroom and posting whatever they want. Ultimately, we must rely on the student being responsible enough to blog in a safe manner. Are the benefits worth the risk?
