Personally, I've never really liked blogging. Being a foreign language teacher, comprehensible input and peer-to-peer interaction are most important to me, something that blogs and other 2.0 technology cannot offer. Technology is very important today for learning a second language as it can give classroom plenty of opportunities for learning material in a more authentic, if not completely authentic, way.
Each and every time I create a lesson plan or a unit plan, my main goal is making the curriculum as authentic as possible. With blogs, I find this hard to do; however, having my students look for and explore blogs in Spanish is something that came to me during this whole process. Language will always be social and having my students explore authentic blogs from native speakers of the Spanish language can show kids how the language is really used, in addition to all of the idiosyncrasies used in the writing of the foreign language that cannot be used in their native language of English. One example of this that I can think of that's extremely simplistic off the top of my head is the use of "@" as a means to neutralize gender. Considering Spanish is a gender heavy language, as in chico is boy and chica is girl, there is no way of simply saying "a kid" without its sex being revealed. Often times Spanish-speakers when they wish to convey this information write it as chic@, having both the qualities of the endings -o and -a.
In my classroom, however, blogs could be useful in the sense of linking and hyperlinking my students information all over the internet. I'm a big fan of choice boards and blogs can be great for choice boards. If all of my students have access to the internet both at home and in the classroom, I could use a blog as a means to organize all of the classroom material where they could easily read daily homework through my updates on the blog. If a student misses a day, this could be a great feature for the student to check my blog for the day's homework. If a student has a question, they could comment or reply on the blog post for that day, sending me a notification to which I could respond to quickly. Also, this opens up the chances for one-on-one communication with my students, something that isn't able to be done often times anymore, especially with many class sizes growing to the size of 30 or more. Lastly, I could link other websites and materials on my blog, such as my own personalized website so that students and parents alike could have easy access to my information and contact information. I plan to make my own personal website this summer in order to get ready for my professional career, giving my students and their parents an easier way to reach me outside of the classroom and parent-teacher conference hours.
As always, certain things appeal to certain teachers, and blogging may not be one of them. I could see it as a vehicle for students to practice writing Spanish (along with the discussion aspect, you could also grade/monitor progress).
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