Using blogs in your classroom

Weblog or also known as blogging, which is basically a conversation. It’s a human connection. It does not matter how you call it, but it does matter how you make use of it. Blogs are a very powerful tool when we talk about education and student learning, because blogs are very constructivist for learning. The benefits are endless and to begin with, in my opinion one of the most important aspect about weblogs is that the content is on the web or maybe you have now heard about the term “Cloud”, which basically is the same. Content on the web is searchable and accessible to everyone. Blogs in the classrooms connect students with other people around the world through chats or emails. Another benefit of using blogs on the classroom is that students enhance their writing not only with text but with pictures, audio and video, which will make more attractive for other students or experts in the field that can comment on the student’s blogs.

We need to be very careful about introducing Weblogs into our classroom, specially for elementary students, we do not expect elementary students to create blogs, but you can ask them to just find information about a certain topic, that way they start having a feeling about what research is about. Middle school students in the other hand, they might be already experts about topics they really like and all of this is the result of using blogs, but we want definitely to make use of blogs in our classroom on older students, for numerous reasons. Once there is a blog out there, they do not just read it, they analyze it, reflect on it and then they provide feedback, by that point they are already collaborating and sharing ideas with classmates and people outside of their classroom, who might have more expertise.

Blogs brings a lot of collaboration among students, because is not only about writing but also about initializing a conversation, some might agree some might disagree with the blog author, but the most important aspect here is that they are sharing their ideas more effectively. They share their opinion about the topic covered in class or about an assignment, they help each other by providing links to site related to the blog. They do not just write but they actually communicate with their classmates. Blogs will also help the student to become more organized, one of the features I really like about blogging is that it allows you to archive your blogs either by date or by categories, making them easy to access and always available for other users.

Some students tend to be shy in the classroom when is time to participate, blogs eliminates the shy on the students and gives them the opportunity to share and discuss in writing the ideas that in an actual classroom they would not be willing to speak. Blog gives them the opportunity to enhance their research skills as they actually analyze and study the “data” before actually posting.