Blogging in the Classroom

I read my buddy Alison's blog and was really impressed with the way she wrote. After reading all of her posts and comparing them to my own I realized that she has a much more informal writing style when blogging as compared to me. I think her blog is a little more conversational and people might actually respond to it better than mine. She seems like she is just talking to you rather than trying to report something. I have a tendency to make my writing very formal (I guess it is all these college papers I am constantly writing!).
I also noticed that we had different views on a few things. Namely the 180 days of instruction. After watching the slide show I could see the point. Maybe our kids are wasting too much time. However, after reading Alison's blog I rethought my original idea. She has kids and knows a lot more about how much pressure kids are actually under in school these days. They do need something to look forward to other than just constant instruction. It is good to read others thought because they might show you things you haven't thought of.
I am not going to say that I chomping at the bit every week to write up my blog. I can say, though, that almost every time I have done one I have learned something I consider to be very valuable information. I have learned so many things about technology in education that I would have remained ignorant of had I not explored different sites and podcasts to blog about them.
I would love to use this technique in my classroom. Not only does it allow students to explore sites they might not otherwise but it also gives them an outlet to express themselves. Alison and I had very different writing styles and different ideas about what we watched. There is no right or wrong or certain way we had to write so we were able to express our own point of view however we wished. It is also such an easy way to gain access to others opinions. It would have been much more difficult if we would have had to write papers instead of blogs and found a classmate to trade with. All I had to do was click and I had full access to the entire class' blog. I think blogs are definitely going to be prominent in the future of education.