Blogging in education
Educational focus
- Reflection
- Sharing of opinion, links, discoveries
- Communication and knowledge-sharing
- Development and demonstration of understanding
- Analysis, synthesis, evaluation
- Presentation and dissemination of information
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)
Links and resources
Rationale for educational blogging, Anne Davis
Using ICTs to support higher order thinking (DECS SA, pdf)
Blogs and wikis, Bemidji State University
Using and assessing blogs for class
Blogs vs wikis: comparison tables