Students using Blogs

Based on no actual expereince in the classroom, and currently no access to them, I am going to give a synopsis of how I would use Blogs in a classroom.
Each day, I would organise a group activity that the class would tackle together. It could be a discussion about a current news item, or a task that they were required to do some simple research on and collabrate with each other. At the end of each day, students would be asked to post reflections about the particular task to their individual Blogs. Once a week, time would be allocated for students to, through their RSS aggregators/readers, view other students blog postings and post academic opinions/replies to their peers postings. This gives students the opportunity to understand how differently individuals may interpret information.
To ensure that these Blogs are not used for Cyber bullying, they would, of course, be monitored by myself ( their teacher) using an RSS aggregator. At the beginning of the term students would be given information on lawful and ethical use of these ICT's and also informed about Netiquette. Students would be made aware that, should they break any of these rules by posting unlawful or unethical comments to thier own or their peers Blogs, they would be asked to explain their actions to avoid instant failure. Any bullying that is discovered would result in instant failure of the course.
In one of my peers blogs, it was stated that their teaching community had decided not to use blogs as it may result in opening the students up to bullying. I disagree with this action. It seems to me that there may be a lack of understanding of these ICT's on the teachers part, and therefore they chose not to use them. This is detrimental to their students education. Throughout the learning journey within this course, I have found more and more evidence that the teaching community today needs to have a little more faith in our students. Yes, students can be cruel and bully their peers. But this happens in all types of environments. It happens on the oval at lunch time, but you don't see teachers banning the oval? Banning the source of the problem does not fix it, it simply ignores it. In my opinion the benefits of using the technologies positively outweigh the disadvantages. The only way to approach cyber bullying, or any other issues that arise with the use of ICT's, is to properly educate our students about the repocussions of their actions. By implementing these ICT's into the students curriculum, "they also learn many skills associated with team work and cilent interaction that are often not taught in courses" ( Kearsley and Shneiderman, 1999) In my opinions stated above, I certainly do not want to portray that Cyber bullying, or any bullying for that matter, are not very real and important issues for our classrooms today. However, using these issues as reasons or excuses not to implement ICT's in a classroom seem, to me, to be the wrong decision.

References

Kearsley, G. & Shneiderman, B. (1999) Engagement Theory: A framework for technology based teaching and learning. Retrieved July 4, 2009, from http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/engage.htm