Venturing Out a Wee Bit

Being a novice with this new tool, I think one of the safest ways at this point to use the blog would be to notify parents of the current happenings of the classroom. (Better stick to what I can't mess up to much for a starter.)  For instance, in our reading class, (4th & 5th grade), we currently produce a "radio" program using the senior edition of Weekly Reader.  The articles are assigned to students who check out the full stories, vocabularies, pronunciations, report to the class and we do a walk through and tape the stories for playback. There are announcers, advertisements and such. Later on in the year we do the same with the video camera and then, move on to produce our own in-house series of newscasts which we broadcast to the whole school.  Also, our school is currently participating in shared visits to classrooms to two other states via Skype. These are things that are enjoyed by our students and parents should be should be interested to know about this use of technology. I would be interested in the comments of parents and the expected brag factor I intend to use as a motivator to go to the next step.  As I become more accustomed to blogging, it is my hope that we can develop podcasts and use blogging to communicate with the other students as we are now doing via Skype. Wish us luck!