My first post Mod 2

Since I had never used blogs at all let alone in my classroom, I was really interested to get ideas of how they could be used most effectively. The first thing I really liked about the concept of blogs discussed in the text was the concept of collaboration and discussion through comments. When teaching a foreign language, it's important to have communication and to have a community. The first way I thought I could use this in my classroom is to have a class blog where each student creates a post a week about what they have learned and we could could have students in another German class in the district or area or a class in Germany comment on it. We could also then comment on that other classes blog creating a learning community. This activity would accomplish the Communication, Cultures and Communities standards in the ACTFL standards. For the Technology Standards for Language Teachers goals it would reach goals 1, 2, 3 and 4. Another activity that was given as an example in the book that could be used with blogging would be where students have their own blogs and they could use them as a portfolio of the best pieces of work. Other students could then go through and correct their peers pieces or give them feedback in the forms of comments. This meets the Communication standard of the ACTFL standards and goals 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the Technology Standards for Language Teachers. Another way of using blogging is having students for every month find a holiday in a country where the target language is spoken and a holiday in their home country and give links in their blog to that information while comparing and contrasting the holidays. Then students from said country (if an exchange program was set up for example) could give their thoughts in the comment section. This would meet the Cultures, Communication and Comparison standards in the ACTFL standards. For the Technology Standards for Language Teachers it would reach goals 1, 2 and 4. Another thing that I liked about using blogs that wouldn't necessarily relate to the standards was the concept of how it can help organize both myself and my students. I teach middle school so students are rarely if ever organized. But if I had all of the assignments and the due dates listed on a blog where students to could refer if they forgot to write down the homework, things would probably work a lot smoother. Also I could incorporate classroom news or put information on about the German club  or foreign language club activities coming up. I could even give the job of "editor" to students. This is really something that I am going to look into. The only thing that I am worried about is the lack of technological resources that my students have. It would be hard to move the assignments to the web since quite a few of my students do not have access to a computer at home and are often stuck watching their siblings and can't get to the library.