Hi everyone! I am new to this whole blogging experience, but I am excited to begin this journey.
In today's society, it is almost impossible to avoid the idea of using technology in the classroom. Technology is something that most of our students have grown up with and known their whole lives. It only makes sense to incorporate something so prominent into the learning experience.
I think that one way for students to utilize blogging in the classroom would be to use blogs as a place for ongoing discussion boards, similar to how we use them on UBLearns. Students can use their blogs for communication in group work, they can use it as a place to ask for help with assignments or to discuss assignments with peers, and they can also use it to communicate with the teacher. Students can also use their blog simply as a journal, that they can share with the teacher, other students, or just with themselves.
Just getting students comfortable with using the medium of a blog can be helpful in enhancing their communication skills, as it gives them another way to communicate instead of just f2f communication.
Some of the NYS learning standards address using language and communication in a variety of different forms (www.nylearns.org):
Performance Indicator - ESL.E.2-4.4.1.1:Students use a variety of oral, print, and electronic forms for social communication and for writing to or for self, applying the convention of social writing.
Performance Indicator - ESL.E.2-4.4.1.6: Students understand and use a variety of oral and communication strategies in American English for various social and academic purposes.
Aside from being very useful to the students, I also believe that blogs can be very important to professional development. Teachers can use blogs to share ideas and thoughts with others, to create a portfolio that other teachers can access and use for fresh ideas, as well as to communicate with other team members and with administration.
I think it would be helpful for teachers to use a blog as the students use it also, so that way, teachers and students are on the same page, and are experiencing something new together.
Hi Jenny, welcome to the blogosphere!
ReplyDeleteYour comment on using blogs for professional networking is very interesting. I also see that happening, and this class is an example of that, sort of!
Additionally, I think that in a given blog, certain posts can be made private or viewable by invite only, thus a blog author can really direct their audience to where they want them be. Additionally, you can just have more than one blog: one for professional networking and one for your students.
I think that Micheal's comment is right on target. It is a good idea to use separate blogs for separate purposes. A class blog would work well for the ideas you mentioned first in your post and a different blog would be a good place to post ideas and links to articles that you would like to share with your colleagues.
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