2. Blogging in education « Meg’s Blogagogy

2. Blogging in education

Meg’s Blogagogical objectives

To identify the main pedagogical and practical reasons for the current success of blogging in educaton.
To analyse how teachers are currently using blogs with and for their students.
To evaluate others’ use of blogs in the classroom.

Your Blogagogical objectives

What are you hoping to learn from this module? Your objectives can be the same as mine, but is there anything else you are expecting to learn? Write down your thoughts, discuss with a partner or small group in the class, or blog it!

Blog it here.

Introduction

Blogs are really starting to take off in the educational arena, and not just amongst ‘tech-savvy’ teachers. Why? What potential do they have for use in education? This module outlines some of the pedagogical and practical arguments for using blogs in the classroom, as well as providing some links to real-life classroom blogs.

Focus questions: Benefits of blogging

Given that you now know something about the ‘blogging interface’ from the What is a blog module, what do you anticipate the educational benefits of blogging to be in terms of 1) classroom management, 2) teaching, and 3) pedagogy? What does blogging force the student to do in terms of writing? Thinking? Communicating? What is it about blogging that might appeal to students? Can using a blog interface make your life easier in the classroom? How would you use blogs to communicate with parents and students? How would you use a blog to run a class or course? Write down your thoughts, discuss with a partner or small group in the class, or blog it!

Blog it here.

Benefits of blogging

With the right educational design, and with good teaching, blogging has many benefits in the educational setting:

Intellectual and writing

Encourages writing
Encourages reading
Encourages diverse perspectives
Teaches appropriate expression of scholarly opinion
Improves writing skills
Promotes interpretation, validation, assessment, analysis, critique, synthesis, evaluation, creativity, imagination

Communication, collaboration, participation, socialisation

Connection with experts
Engagement in the community
Audience — you can have readers in the wider world
Developing links and networks with others
Appropriate online behaviour

Motivation and organisation

Control and ownership on the part of the blogger
Students who lack routine and order in their study find blogs useful for organising notes, thoughts, information (Armstrong, Berry and Lamshed 2004)
Students try harder when they know their work is being published to the world

Management

Ease of feedback from both teacher, other students, and the world in general
Allows for archiving and searching
You (and the student) can track learning progress through time
Easy communication with students and parents

Classroom benefits (Oradini and Saunders 2007)

Easier for students to submit their work
Easier for the tutor to view work quickly
Helps in the monitoring of student progress
Provides templates to enable scaffolding of student progress
Facilitates provision of both formative and summative feedback
Allows students to be more creative
Saves time when collecting work
Accessible anywhere

The potential of blogs Tan, Ow and Ho (2005: 4) (pdf)

Exercise: Blogs in the classroom

Search for some (Aussie) edublogs on the web to get a sense of how teachers of your year level are using blogs in their classrooms. Try to identify the purpose of the blog: Is it for communicating with students or parents? Is it posting assignment or class info? Do students have their own blogs for the class? Blog what you find by providing links and observations.

Blog it here.

Exercise: Effectiveness of blogging

Next, evaluate the effectiveness of the blogging enterprises you come across: Are the students engaged? Are they responding to others’ blog posts? Are they posting their own material? Are posts focused and on-topic? Are the posts interesting? What is the quality of the writing like? What about the thinking? Is the blog easy to navigate? Blog your evaluations. Have you found any dodgy examples of classroom blogging? What makes them dodgy?

Blog it here.