Blogs in Education

As I searched for educational blogs I found that they can be used in a variety of forms. The first thing that I noticed is that there are teachers out there blogging away about everything from their classes, to their personal lives, to things that are going on with education in the political realm. Mostly, for my searches I encountered either that form of blog, or student blogs related to the content of a course. I found a couple websites that interest me. In one, students are using blogs as a form of pen-pal communication with a student somewhere else in the country or world. This is really a neat idea to me. Also, one website (that actually is for a WSU class, but I'd use it in my classroom) has students discussing activities that occurred in class and giving each other performance critiques online. Lastly, an idea that I got from our wiki discussions would be to have students do group play writing. As a class we could agree on characters that would start off the play, and then students could go to the wiki and change the dialogue or add more dialogue and action, and then on a different section of the wiki do a little post on why they made those changes and where they think the story should go for the next person. I didn't find anything really like that in my search, but I can't imagine that I'd be the first to think of this possibility.

I am not a big journal-y person, but blogging would be a great way to cut down on the paper load as a teacher. You could check the student's blog from anywhere and not have to lug home journals. I also feel that students can have the opportunity to take the things they are learning in class and discuss them outside of that environment. Sometimes you don't make a connection or realize something until the class period is over, and then that insight is lost to the class, but students can go home and put that thought down on their blog.

The cons to blogging that I see are that they sometimes get off of educational objectives easily. One teacher talked a lot about their personal life, and while there was nothing earth-shatteringly awful, there is the potential for teachers as well as students to share inappropriate material. The Internet gives people a false sense of anonymity and that can lead to blogs that are not educational in nature. The second con is safety. When you are having kids put things on the web, the paramount concern should be that they are safe and being safe on the web.

The pros, though, as stated before are that the students can connect with each other and take learning outside of the classroom. They also can share information and engage with the material by journaling at their own pace.