Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Why Use Blogs in the Classroom?

This page is a brain dump list of benefits for using blogging as a teaching tool. Many of these ideas have been collected from reading about educational blogging and talking to teachers who have been using blogs with their students.

1. Blogging is a high interest way of getting kids to write, something that is a fast growing area of research. It doesn’t take much study, however, to know that using technology is a motivator for many kids.
2. Our students are “digital natives”.  It is to our advantage to use the tools they are comfortable with.
3. Students can write blog posts from their home computer… or anywhere they have an internet connection such as cell phones.
4. Students with limited social and/or verbal skills, and who are often unwilling to contribute original ideas in class, may have a more equal footing in online conversations conducted through the written comment responses on a blog.
5. The process of blogging addresses the problem of “wait time” in questioning. All students, regardless of learning style, have the time to consider the prompt and formulate a response.
6. The nature of writing comments to a blog post, including the ability to preview your post, encourages self-editing and re-writing by students.
7. Student work written as blog posts is easy for the teacher to read and respond to. The teacher can also work at home or from any internet access point. The material is also more legible, and the font size in a browser can even be increased, making reading student work easier on the eyes.
8. Blogs foster interaction between students. They can read and review what their fellow classmates write, which can encourage critical thinking as students defend or refute the comment posts of others.
9. Students have a way to compare the quality of their comments, form and content, to other comment posts. This provides a interesting twist on peer edit and using student work to model writing skills.
10. Teacher who also blog are modeling the writing process in their posts and comments.
11. The blogging process encourages critical reading. Students must learn to carefully read what others have written in order to write meaningful comments.
12. In addition, students must also learn to read a wide variety of sources in order to write meaningful posts of their own.
13. Student work is automatically is archived, creating a portfolio of their work over a period of time. It is then easy to go back and compare the quality of the posts and comments from early to late in the school year.

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