Using Blogs in Education

To be honest at first I was struggling with this, how could blogs be used in the classroom?

When the ideas eventually started flowing it quickly became a flood of ideas.  Blogs can be used in education to ;

• Be used as a reflection and self evaluation tool
• Completion of homework tasks
• Collaborate with students across the class, the year level, the school, the community or the world
• Create book reviews - sharing opinions on books
• Teacher collaboration and sharing of ideas and practices
• Foster writing and research skills
• Provide a genuine audience for sharing of written work
• Improve reading skills
• As a tool for cross curriculum activities
• Provides an efficient and effective tool for moderation and comparison of student work
• Peer motivation - sharing of ideas and feelings, providing feedback to peers
• Create an online version of debating for various topics

Reflecting on the use of Blogs in education I began to better understand why the writing task in the NAPLAN testing from 2011 has been changed to persuasive/exposition. This style of writing is used more often in everyday life situations to share opinions and thoughts especially in a tool such as a Blog. Use of this type of educational tool enables students to share thoughts and opinions with a real life audience.

When a Blog is setup up it is fast and efficent to use and is interesting and interactive for students that are digitial natives.

The learning manager needs to set guidelines for use of Blogs and needs to monitor the interactions to ensure the tool is not being used for cyber bullying.