Week Five: Blogs in K-12 Classrooms

Blogging has become very common in classrooms all over the world. It is a way for parents, teachers, and activists to share information with one another. Although it is beginning to become a huge means for communication in the world of Education, blogging has caused several problems for some schools participating in these blogging sites. As I searched the web for information on blogs in schools, I came across several interesting sites that had appealing information within their blogs. These blogs were either written by parents, teachers, activists, and some students as well.
At http://district229.typepad.com/, I read information on blogging in Chicago Schools. This site shared information about things that were going on in the community socially,as well as politically. It discusses schools and their attempt to succeed academically as a whole student body. There was some very important information on this site as well. It revealed how more than 200 schools in Chicago are being removed from improvement status as a result to their student performance attendence and graduation rates. This blog spot also seems to be a place where parents, teachers, and activists read the latest news, share the latest gossip, and find out what's going on in other parts of the city. Personally, I feel that this could be a good or bad result for students having access to these blog sites.
At http://theworldisyourcampus.wordpress.com/, blogs discussed issues about how half of Minnesota schools are failing under the "No Child Left Behind" act. Several school funding is being cut for services that have been established to help English Language Learners and children with special needs. This has become a great burden to many parents and educators as well. At http://blog.alfranken.com/, the issue of high school drop-outs in Minnesota is being efficiently evaluated. There had been consideration of raising the drop-out age from 16 to 18. Their intent would be to force most of the state's thousands of high school drop-outs to stay in school. They would like to take the opportunity to teach kids how to recognize when their time is being wasted, and to encourage them to seek better options. Their goal in this attempt would be to try to increase the college attendence and graduation rate.