Blogging Articles

Since my husband is a lawyer I decided to read about Blogging and the Law. The tips offered at the end of the article provided a great deal of insight into avoiding or defending yourself against libel, copyright, freedom of information and privacy lawsuits. While I can’t imagine myself purposely being so guilty of any of these things, it is certainly good to know briefly what you should or should not do.

I also read the article “To Blog or Not to Blog”. I went through that debate internally when I was trying to decide whether or not to teach my students how to blog. I had the permission of the district to do it (which I was surprised by, but it is educational) but I was still afraid some Internet predator would track down my kids based on their post about Charlotte’s Web and I would feel horrible. It didn’t help that I saw a really scary episode of Law & Order that had murder and violence and kidnapping all tied to student blogs. Not good. But I searched for a long time for a safe site and then decided it would be better for me to teach my students how to be safe on the Internet rather than wait for them to learn on their own and not figure out the safety rules until it was too late. That was really the main reason why I went through with it. It’s like sex…kids are going to do it, you might as well teach them how to be safe. The older generations who don’t fully understand or use these technologies sometimes react by just disallowing their kids to do these things, but that isn’t going to stop them. The technologies adults are using (like email and websites) are viewed as archaic by today’s teens. They blog and text message as means to communication and if we, as teachers, want to educate them we need to be “up” on these technologies as well. So anyway, reading this article just reinforced those ideas for me. Blog on, people!