Upon reading the article, Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy, by Diane Penrod, I was particularly interested in the blogging and visually impaired students portion of it. I agree with all of the article that blogging encourages fluency in writing, cooperative learning, critical thinking, and performance based learning among other cross-curricular strategies.
The portion of the article that was dedicated to blogging and visually impaired students sparked my interest. I wondered...how do these students benefit from blogs? Well, the article answers this question for me because it talks about audioblogging technology, podcasts, and screen readers, which visually impaired students can contribute to. These technologies are often free for the students and the parents, which is awesome! An interesting audioblog that I found online was about making pumpkin seeds. It has an audio file embedded that tells you the steps to make the pumpkin seeds outloud. Very cool! Also, audio blogging and podcasts are made up of sound and have some titles and links. With audio blogs, visually impaired students can participate in creative and engaging writing activities just like their classmates. This is awesome and I am happy that we have such advanced technology that can help all students become better writers and bloggers.
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