Blogs
A blog is an online journal/Web site that allows online members to post notes and receive feedback. Several online blogs are popular with adolescents. Teachers use blogs to pose thought-provoking questions that will elicit a more reflective response than a simple answer. For example, writing teachers can use blogs to link adolescents’ need to experiment with adolescents’ love of technology.
Learning is, after all, intensely social, and blogs as social software are all about connecting and communicating. With a group course blog, individual blogs for each student, and plenty of time together talking, we build a committed learning community beyond the confines of the classroom, and reap the considerable rewards of collaborative learning.1
The public nature of blogs may encourage students to be careful about their grammar, particularly when teachers and parents comment on students’ work. It also allows quiet students to have a voice.
Blogs pose challenges to educators and require considerable time and care. For example, teachers need to devote time to updating the course blog and responding to students. Time is also required to monitor each student’s blog for appropriateness. In addition, some districts may block all commercial site blogs for safety and security reasons.
Teachers who have experimented with blogs have the following suggestions for other educators:
- Read many blogs to see what types of functions they can serve.
- Figure out the purpose of a planned classroom or team blog.2
- Share selected examples with students and discuss ground rules for participating in a project involving blogs.
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Footnotes
1 Barbara Ganley, “
This Time, It's Personal: Elevating Creative Discourse Through Student Blogs” (Outside Source),
ASCD Express (January 2006).
2 Dennis Pierce, “
Panelists: Blogs Are Changing Education,”
eSchool News (Outside Source), March 24, 2006.