Conclusion on Blogging

Hello Everyone!

Thank you very much for a great week of posts!  It was a great week of discussion and we learned a lot about your practical experiences in blogging.

From our week’s discussion, we found that most people used blogging either in the classroom or for personal reasons.  In this post, I will only focus on how blogs have been used in an educational setting.

Current uses of blogging:

From this week’s discussions, it seems that educators are currently using blogs for the following purposes:

  1. Classroom management – posting assignments, class notes, Q&A section for students, articles/videos of interest
  2. Discussion – Students posted their reflections or thoughts based on a specific question or activity
  3. ePortfolios – Students have a space where they can showcase their artwork, videos or other digital artifacts.

Blogging Benefits:

When using blogs in the classroom, they can:

  • facilitate shyer students to participate in discussions
  • improve the quality of student work
  • have an open space where students/parents can find classroom materials

Issues to consider when blogging:

While there may be benefits, there are some considerations teachers need to think about prior to blogging.  These include:

  • time needed to manage and maintain blogs
  • educating students about security/safety issues so that they are not putting personal information on the blog and putting themselves at risk
  • students creating inappropriate posts or posts with inaccurate information
  • students not being receptive to the blogging activities and not participating

All of the above needs to be addressed prior to starting a blogging activity. Parents need to be made aware of the blogging activity and it must follow school and district guidelines.  In addition, the teacher should create strict blogging guidelines that students should follow and immediately address any breaches of conduct that do arise.

Future of Blogging:

When looking at blogging as a venture for the educational market, many of you had some ideas of what should be done to make blogs go from good to great:

  • Address security issues:  Allow blogs have the flexibility to be kept private in a closed system, where the teacher controls the people who have access to the posts.
  • Add Video, voice threads or Live Forums:  Right now blogs are very much a written medium and it would be good to have the option to upload videos or voice messages.  Also as blogging is more of a asynchronous type of activity, the addition of a live forum can move it to synchronous mode.
  • Change layout of discussions:  Allow the discussions to be threaded as they are in our WebCT discussion forums and have an option to download and save discussion threads.
  • Make blogging in the classroom easy to implement and maintain:  Teachers already are pressed for time and it would be best if future blogging platforms are easy to set up and manage.
  • Make connecting with other networks and blogs easier:  To help promote the work being done by students, future blogging platforms should have the option of connecting to other relevant blogs and sites. This way students and teachers can truly become a part of the global community (if they choose).
  • Customization:  Allow more flexibility in the blogging platform to allow for more customization.  This way teachers can tailor the blogging platform to suit their chosen activity.

Thanks everyone for participating!  We hope you enjoyed this presentation as much as we did!

Juliana, Brenda, Deb and Jenaca

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