Blogging as an Art Teacher

Q: How can you practically use blogs in your classroom/as an educator? What is the impact on both teachers and students? Are there any potential problems and/or risks with blog use in the classroom?

Blogs are like online journals where you can keep track of your thoughts with writing, photos, and videos. Blogging is a great tool for educators to share tips, lessons, and resources with others. I myself have saved multiple Art Teacher blogs for quick references to lesson ideas, classroom management tips, and other resources that have helped me grow as an art teacher.

A blog is also like an online portfolio. Especially as an art teacher, where what we do is literally visual arts, keeping a blog can help compile all our work in one place. This way it can be easy to share a blog link to potential employees for them to see what you do, and for them to get a *hopefully* good impression on who you are as a teacher. 

Blogs are not only for fellow art teachers and administration, they're also great for parents and students. I know many teachers who use blogs in order to easily communicate with parents and students on what they've been doing in the classroom weekly. Parents enjoy seeing photos of students work and can get a quick overview of what their child is doing in your class. It's also very helpful for students who may be absent for a day or a long period of time. They can see an overview of what was done in the classroom. This is especially helpful if your school doesn't use online classroom tools like Google Classroom.

As an art teacher I can see a blog being a great way to keep track of projects that I've done as well. Some of my favorite art teacher blogs post honest feedback on their lessons; what worked, what didn't work well, and how they would change the lesson for next time. Often times I may teach a lesson and want to change it for next time, but I never write it down and therefore forget. Having a blog where I keep track of how lessons went could help remind myself of how to improve my lessons.

Of course creating and maintaining a blog is not so simple. It takes time to get a hang of how to create a cohesive looking blog, not to mention posting to it regularly during your busy schedule. I would like to maintain a blog for my classroom in order for students to dive deeper into topics, where I can share links for further information pertaining to an artist, culture, movement, that we talked about in class. It would be great for students to have their own virtual space to upload their artwork to have an online portfolio but I wouldn't have students create blogs of their own for my class because of privacy issues. Of course, to solve this problem students can change the settings to be set to Private so that only those who have their link can view the blog. 

Overall, I think its a great tool for teachers to have online portfolios and a place to share their ideas and keep track of their work.