First Post

This is the first day of the rest of my life...... well, at leat the first day with my name out in the blogosphere. I've spent the morning reading teachers' blogs for the Web 2.0 class and have seen some interesting things. In particular the idea of finding other knowledgeable people to steal - oops - borrow from is intriguing.

On the other hand, I've got a lot of questions. For one, how can a blog be useful in a hardcore math class like precal? Precal is a college prep math class - sorry to say it, but no one cares how you feel in a class like that (other than the normal human interaction). How does blogging facilitate learning in such an environment? I like the idea of interactive discussion, but how well can this work without the specialized symbols we need for mathematics?

For my statistics class, I can see how a class blog might be useful - statistics is as much English as Math in some ways and anything that would get kids talking is a good idea. Since they are used to blogs, the idea of asking them to write something might come naturally.

I worry also about how one can protect children's privacy and confidentiality on an open forum. I can see a closed blog, where one can make mistakes, but the idea of taking risks in front of the whole world is off-putting to say the least.