The Talkback Project

I found the writing with blogs and the Talkback project to be very intriguing. Pre-teens and Teenagers are all about expressing their emotions and feelings on their personal blog sites everyday and intigrating this blogging into school work seems like it would make sense in helping students to become more excited about their school work. The project was set up so students would read a novel and then blog their responses to the novel on a Talkback Project blog so the teachers were able to respond to these blogs with their own ideas and opinions. One part of this article even mentioned a parent who was overseas in Iraq getting involved in his students work by participating in the readings and blogging as well. I think this is a very good idea to get all sorts of parents involved in their students work because they can access this blog site from work or home and it would not be too time consuming. I understand the safety issue also presented in this article. Pseudonyms are used but students can mess up and mention things about where they live. If this project is to be successful I think it is important to emphasize to students how crucial it is to be safe on the internet and not give out any personal information. Students will probably be blogging on their own anyways so this lesson could be benneficial for their safety at home as well. We are living in a technological society and students these days are used to expressing themselves online so if teachers can find a way to intigrate this into the classroom most students should respond to it well.