What is Blogging?

Blogging is an online log, written in chronological order of events, of reviews, ideas, and personal rants. Blogs usually contain images, video streams, links to sites and other blogs that the owner is interested in or can link to his or her entry.

If someone responds to what was written it is known as a comment and can be seen by the writer and other people. This is very important to the concept of blogs and is a key idea due to the fact that blogging is interactive. Because of this blogging can lend itself very easily to education as an independent medium.

How to Apply Blogging in Education:

The two main things that you need to do when blogging is read and write. So, naturally this is an excellent idea for just about anything in school. Journals can be kept by students on a novel they are reading in class, about a project they are working on, science lab results, publish poems and stories, present artwork, and others. In turn other students can read and comment on their peers work.

Where to Look:

There are many sites that offer blogs for no or little cost. Some are very easy to use and others take some more work. The most popular is Blogger and Google owns it. (Big surprise there!) Technorati and Wordpress are also excellent choices. Squarespace is new but has some wonderful templates, as does Thoughts. There are so many free sites that offer blog hosting that you will just have to try them out and see which one works best for you.

A site that is setup just for educational blogging is 21 Classes. This site is idea for yonger grades because no email address is needed to create a personal space.

Pros:
There are not papers to hand in or loose in this medium. You can monitor your students’ progress and comment on their work much easier than with a paper. Peer editing and collaboration happen naturally in this format. It enables the students to have published works.

Cons:
Bloggs are mainly public sites so anyone can see if the writer does not set up restrictions. There is no control over the comments. A computer with an Internet connection is required and may not be available in all homes or classrooms.