There are so many reasons that I use blogging in the classroom and all of them are positive. I can’t really say that some of the reasons are more important than others, they’re all so different that it’s not fair to compare them to each other. However, some have more serious consequences than others, in particular the ones that can get you into trouble from infringing copyright law. In class we constantly talk about the importance of making sure that any images we use are our own and that we never just take an image from Google and stick it on our blogs. I came across this scary story recently from a blogger who was threatened with an $8,000 fine for using an image from Google. After hiring lawyers and going through a stressful legal process, he ended up having to pay $3,000 to the owner of the image. Simply put, lawyers are constantly fishing around the internet (particularly blogs) for people who are using images that aren’t their own, just so they can approach the owner of the image and drum up some business for themselves. My point here is it just isn’t worth the risk. Check your blogs and change or delete any posts with images that aren’t yours. This is one tough lesson we don’t want to have to learn!