Part two of my seven part series: Why you should let your children blog.
2. A blog is a great venue for practicing technical and computing skills.
Ask a kid to practice algebra for fun, and you are not likely to get a happy response. Show your child how to customize the look of their blog by installing themes and uploading graphics, you’ll often get a much more enthusiastic response.
Blogs are fun but have a technical side that must be attended to if the child wants it to be an expression of their unique character. And when you have to do it for something fun, you have more incentive and inclination to learn.
Learning typing skills – The nature of a blog is the written word—lots of them—and currently the primary way of getting those words onto the computer is via a keyboard. A blog will not teach a child to type, however the need to keyboard well to in order to write a lot, that will certainly encourage a child to want to learn or improve upon their keyboarding.
Develop computer skills beside playing games – In an increasingly computerized world, having a broad range of technical skills (from typing to editing programming code to photo editing) will help your child in many academic, career and business pursuits. And I’m not talking about the kid who wants to be a programmer. Even people in “non-technical” careers are going to need a little about lots of different computer skillsets.
The many aspects of having and maintaining a Web site tends to force you to learn about a lot. If your photos are too large to import, you learn to edit them. If your blog title is too small, you figure out how to tweak the CSS code. If want to display you YouTube videos, you might end up learning a little about embedding links. The nice thing about blogs is that a lot of features are automated. It’s simple to use at first, but if your child wants to do more with it, he or she can (and will probably look to) learn new skills as needed.
