Post #3 - How Can I Use Blogs in my Classroom?

There are multiple ways to use a blog in the classroom. Some ways can be helpful for students, some are helpful for teachers, and others are helpful for both. I think one of the best ways to use a blog is to help with student mastery in content. The student mastery would come from the students teaching each other the a piece of the content on the blog just like a jigsaw classroom. I can assign groups of students different topics to master and then blog about. This way the blogs stay out there for the whole year, In the jigsaw classroom students have to write notes about what other students are teaching them. Their notes will not be as useful as looking at the blog their classmates have created. The problem with that is that the students could explain the material incorrectly or not clearly.

The blogs can also be useful for student feedback. Every week the students could write a blog about the week in my class. What did they enjoy in class? What did they not enjoy? What concepts do they thing they have mastered? What concepts they didn't understand?. This could be useful except for the fact that students will most likely not like it. If I make it a requirement some student may put minimal effort and not give the feedback I need to help them. If I don't require blogging, many students won't even blog.

A problem with blogging in general is that not every student will have easy access to a computer outside of a classroom. There may not be a lot of computers in the school either making it even harder for certain students to access the blogs.

There are many good aspects to using a blog but there are many constraints. The goal is to use blogging properly to engage students and get the information you want out of them.