03.11.08
Educational Blogging
From reading the article on educational blogging, the use of blogs within the classroom became a viable prospect. After all, the benefits the students and teachers gain, expressed by the article, seem too advantageous to not incorporate blogging in the classroom. The opportunity of using the internet and blogging to present your ideas to the world is one that most students would seize, it being a novel alternative to writing in their exercise books. The article is determined to promote the use of blogging and rightly so. It is a valuable tool with numerous benefits that many attest to. Using blogging as an educational tool acts as a motivating factor in getting students to want to read and write, and after all what teacher doesn’t want their students to enjoy reading and writing? But is it really pragmatic to assume that all the students’ hesitations towards classroom literacy to be solved by incorporating educational blogging within the classroom?
March 12, 2008 at 12:54 am
I agree with your viewpoints on the article you read Lauren, I too read a similar article and have found that using blogs in the classroom is an excellent way to get students to express themselves and reflect on what they have learnt. Furthermore I also agree with your inhibition of incorporating blogs into school work to solve every child’s literacy difficulties as to write a blog means that they are using literacy, and therefore need to have the adequate literacy skills to do so. I fear that if a child is struggling with reading and writing, a blog may reinforce the idea that they are inadequate compared to their peers, and as a teacher in training I do not want my student’s to feel as thought they are simply not good enough.
March 23, 2008 at 9:02 pm
yes, a legitimate question Lauren! Like any use of learning technologies, the crucial factor is not the technology itself but the teachers’s role and the associated teaching approaches! I’m sure any positive literacy development through student ‘blogging’ (or podcasting for that matter) is no exception!