Organization and convenience

A difficulty for many teachers is organization. Keeping track of material covered, when it was covered, homework given, and information stressed in a lesson or added as a result of class discussion can be daunting. Other difficult issues are the time constraint of a class period and the need to move at a pace comfortable for the majority of the class, which results in some material not being covered adequately or excluded completely. There is also the reality of individual students who are not able to keep up with the pace of a specific lesson, or students who are simply having a bad day as a result of sickness, family or social issues. A teacher blog allows an easy, colorful, flexible site for documenting class activity. With minimal effort, a teacher can discuss critical material covered in a daily lesson plan. This can include assorted items - pages of the text covered that day, terms or vocabulary explained during class, links to web documents used in class, or listing assessment dates and expectations for student learning. More important than simply documenting material, the blog allows a teacher to highlight critical material as reinforcement to those on task, or, more important, as a resource for students who struggled with the material or were not attentive or in attendance when the material was covered. This is particularly convenient when a student is out ill, suspended, or out of class for the myriad of reasons that the school day throws at a teacher. It is also a tool in schools where computers are a part of the classroom when the teacher is out of the class. Students can log onto the site, access the lesson plan, link to appropriate sites, and report by responding in the comment section with questions or evidence of learning. The blog becomes a class history, accessible from numerous locations at any time of the day or night, and can be managed at the pace useful to the person interacting with it.