Session 9: Educational Blogs

Consider the Use of Blogs In Education...

Blogsites can provide a communication space where teachers can foster curriculum for students to develop writing skills, collaboration with students and the sharing of ideas. The student blogsite also offers the student a personal or shared learning journal to report the work being accomplished in the classroom.

In fact, I can make a modest list of possible approaches in using this Blog technology in the classroom:

a) Blogging software allows for easy peer review for students and teachers
b) Allows easy access to experts or mentors from outside the classroom
c) Audio blogs can help students work on reading and pronunciation skills. (Students’ pronunciation of words can be recorded. Posting these audio files on a blog allows students to later play the files to hear how they sound.
d) Blogs can become classroom access points where students can access archived handouts, view posted homework assignments and read additional teacher comments
e) School clubs, activities and sports teams can use blogs to post scores, meeting minutes, and links to relevant issues and topics.

I find myself asking the following question: As an educator, am I surfing the crest of this new particular wave of technology where using one web application becomes a one approach fits all purpose? Or am I surfing toward a hidden undertow that will water down, perhaps even drown, the student’s learning process? Without the student’s participation, and their involvement being more than acquiring assignments or directions, what I see is a website. That is all. There is nothing new.

Blogging can effectively become a workable classroom activity because of its functional use and easy appliance. It’s the direction of how blogging will be integrated into the curriculum that will determine whether the student creates or collaborates and utilizes the blog posting process thereby further enhancing the learning process.

The blog post is still an asynchronous format in communicating. Under this guise, I still favor the Electronic BlackBoard or Moodle applications. The direct scaffolding of comments is in unison to the same topic or created with a new post topic, unlike a blog where postings are time stamped but don’t offer a way to respond to posts set apart by topic. That would call for a new blog post entered only by the blog owner.

Blogs offer consumers of knowledge an abundance of information. The excitement of considering blogs in education lies in the use of Rich Site Summary or RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The use of a feed aggregator provides a new form of receiving desired communication from wanted sources. Teachers who assign students to create their own blogs can easily keep track of what students have posted by subscribing to their students' feeds and checking their aggregators regularly. Parents can subscribe to feeds such as their children’s homework page or the school’s activity page. A classroom teacher who wants to stay up to date on the most recent tools in educational technology can create a search at Feedster, subscribe to the retrieved results, and will be notified automatically with any newly listed reference. Educators and school districts can also use this syndication process to communicate with students, teachers and parents.

Ideally, as educators we need to recognize not only instructive methodology but the tools to improve learning, then place those tools into the students’ own hands so they can construct knowledge by developing a self-discovered process.