Better blogging (#3)

Anne Davis’s blog entry, A quest for good image sites, discusses finding pictures to use on a blog. In addition to giving the reader a list of websites where one can find pictures, the author also talks about copyright and when one can and cannot copy pictures for using on your own blog. Although I have been blogging for more than a year, I’ve only used original photos. It never occurred to me that there was a place on the Internet where I could find photos to use on my blog.

Reading this and other entries on her blog has caused me to think about how I can incorporate blogs into my Com 110 classes. This also makes me think about the need to tell my students about copyright and why they cannot simply copy any photo from a website and put it in their own blog or web page. This information fits in well with the copyright chapter in Teaching and Learning at a Distance.

I also enjoyed several of Davis’s other posts about how she has used blogging with elementary students. My first degree is in English, and I have always believed that children will never learn how to write well unless they spent a lot of time writing. But the next question everyone asks is, “How do you get kids to write?” For 20-something years now, teachers have tried to use journaling, but I think that one of Davis’s fifth-grade students hit the nail on the head when he said that he likes to blog because people from all over the world can read his writing and can comment on it. That must be greatly encouraging!

My favorite thing about Davis’s blog is that she fills it with hotlinks to whatever she is writing about, so it’s easy to find more information about everything she mentions. It’s one of those things that makes the difference between a good blog and a great blog.