Blogs and Blogging

The simplest way to think of a blog is as an online discussion, or a "chronologically arranged online journal" according to Joyce Valenza. Blogs are the place for the exchange of ideas and information. The Web is populated by an enormous number of blogs, with topics ranging from politics to society to family and kids to yes, education (Edublogs.org, a major hosting site for education blogs, currently has over 600,000 being used by teachers like you). As I discussed in Web 2.0, a term which itself has become passe, this development has meant that anyone with an idea and rudimentary computer skills can be expressing those ideas online in a matter of minutes. As with any freely expressed idea, some are good, some are bad, some are garbage. A few are incredible. My personal favorite general information blog is The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com). Whoever manages that blog does an amazing job.

But the popularity of blogs is not the issue here. That's a given - people love to express themselves, and blogs give those expressions the widest possible dissemination. Oh nay nay - the issue is how you can best use blogs to enhance learning in your classroom. We know that learning is enhanced when topics are discussed, when a student can take the basic information about a subject, combine that with the understanding and opinions of others, chew it all around for a while, and synthesize some final conclusion and understanding. Blogs take that discussion and build on it exponentially.

There are distinct advantages to asynchronous online discussion versus classroom venues. In no particular order, they are:

1. Since blogs do not have the immediacy of face to face discussion, the ideas and expressions the contain can theoretically have more thought behind them. A student may formulate his or her best response only after some thought, and not having to express the idea immediately gives time for that thought.

2. A student is usually making a blog entry outside the classroom, so the sense of having 20 or 30 pairs of eyes and ears on you when you answer is removed. The fear of public speaking is common, and expressing one's self in a group situation is often perceived as public speaking. This is especially true when the speaker has not had time to formulate a complete response. Since the fear of public speaking comes from the fear of looking foolish, as student with this fear is likely to sit quietly, letting others with fewer inhibitions do the talking.

3. Blogs can be written in a more casual style than would be required for an academic paper. These frees the students to express themselves more freely, without the restrictions of APA niceties. You may even choose to let the students use their everyday electronic language, including all those puzzling contractions, abbreviations, and shorthand (a recent favorite of mine is "Imma", meaning "I'm going to").

4. You can better assess a student's understanding of a subject when they write bog entries. Again, they're freed from the other concerns of writing and can express what they know in their own words.

Setting up a blog is easy. In addition to Edublogs, Weebly offers special services to teachers, including web sites and blogs, and the two big dogs in the business, WordPress and Blogger (owned by Google), are commonly used even by professional bloggers. There are many others; be sure to investigate them for ease of use, security, and features before you start doing anything with them. To get some idea of how and why to actually use blogs in your classroom, read what fellow teachers Mollie Crie and Doug Caldwell have to say about them.