Wow i'm a blogger! My name is Ryan Seifert and I was born in South Dakota but have lived in Alberta for most of my life. I have been married for 3 years to my wife Heidi and we have a blast together. I love to do various sports but mainly now i stick to golf and the occasional floor hockey game. I work part time at the keg and will have been there for 3 years in November. It's a great job and i work with alot of fun people. I am in an after degree program at the U of L and can't wait to be a teacher, it feels like i have been in school forever.

There are many benefits to using blogging in the classroom but we also have to be careful of the challenges that it can create. Blogging could be a great tool for kids to communicate with other children in other parts of the world. For example in social studies students could converse back and forth about current events and how they feel about them or how the events affected their life. I thought a great example would be communicating with children from China to see how they felt of their country's new found capitalist ideals. By doing this it would accomplish one of the outcome's that was described in the ICT of aquiring alternate viewpoints using technology.

Blogging could be a great tool used as a way of communciation between students and the teacher. The teacher could have a blogsite which he/she could update daily with details of assignments or field trip specifics. Say if the student lost the instructions for an assignment they could simply look up the information on the blog. This style of communication is useful but should not be used as the main avenue for questions, students should continue to seek out teachers for help after class.

In the ICT it talks about how students should be able to navigate, edit, compose, and communicate using technology and blogging satisfies many of these outcomes. Students need to navigate the internet in order to get to the web site and they need to create their own blog which gains them more comfortability on the computer as a whole. Students will compose and edit pieces of imformation that they will display on their blogs and they can communicate with their peers using the blog.

Although i worry about internet predators who might look at the students blog. Hopefully secure sites could be set up that only people with access could only view.

Parents also have the opportunity to see what the students are learning and be able to check out homework due dates and a variety of information that could be posted on a class blog. But here again we have to be careful that the main type of teacher parent communciation is not through a computer but face to face.

Overall blogging could be a viable resource which has many positive outcomes that could be used for learning in todays classroom.