One Tool in Depth: The Blog

When it comes to how to use technology in the classroom, I did a little heavier research on blogging because I’ve had experience with it and have seen how it can be used to help students in the classroom.  Hopefully this posts will help you get started with a simple method of effective internet writing so that you can create valuable authentic experiences for your classroom.

For starters, what is a blog?  According to Dana j. Wilber, “A blog is simply a website that is authored by a single person or a group that allows the author or authors to post or publish writing in the reverse order  so that the most recent posts are first” (45).  Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?  Blogs, though can be powerful tools for student learning and they develop a new literacy through this medium.  The important things to know are how blogs work and how to use them effectively.  You must do your research, but despite the struggles that may come with learning and developing a new system for writing assignments, blogs offer many advantages that traditional writing lacks.   Sara Kajder, in Adolescents and Digital Literacy, tells us that, “In the publishing of their ideas, [students] closely engage with and possibly even remake content, but, more important to the eventual step to ‘information creation,’ they begin to develop and expert voice” (17).  The act of actually publishing work is something that isn’t offered students as often in other mediums, and it also calls for them to be more careful in their writing if they know it will be available to their peers.  Several sources tell us that students who engage in regular internet writing develop greater critical thinking skills.
Other advantages that Kajder mentions include that blogs can help with revision, conferring with others, and being aware of one’s audience.   It can “help them build more substantive texts both individually and collaboratively” (35).  Features such as the ability to search blogs and commenting allow students to engage with each other’s work and bounce ideas off one another as well as receive meaningful feedback. One way to use blogs is to allow students to work through final assignments in a series of posts that scaffold their thinking while also allowing them to receive early feedback.  An article by Denise Johnson states, "Blogging is a reciprocal process; it requires reading as much as writing; listening as much as speaking.” Writing is collaborative and blogging can help bring these aspects out for even more quiet students while building their own social skills.
As teachers, not only can we then use this medium to find ways to connect student learning and make it more authentic, but we will have an easier time responding to student’s needs.  Kajder again observed, “Digital response allows time to pause and reflect on each student’s needs” (37).  When you have set up your blog, you can use commenting and the student’s ability to revise to help them one on one in the processes in a way that might be a lot more difficult in a classroom full of students. 
This last semester, I somehow ended up in a "Smartphone Shakespeare" class.  I had no idea at all what to expect and was soon thrown into writing blog posts and using a chat app that I’d never heard of before.  Surprisingly, these things actually proved to be very effective in getting me to interact more with other students and build ideas off of them.  We were able to have a class blog where many of our assignments were turned in and where we were required to comment occasionally.  We also got to use this blog for pre-writing and other exercises that carried us through the writing processes and brought in the much needed social aspects of learning.  This blog is also something that I will be able to access when I have left the class or that other Shakespeare enthusiasts can access when doing their own informal research.  I'll admit though, this sort of teaching is something still being explored and comments felt a bit forced at times.  It also felt from time to time as though I was playing a guessing game of how much involvement was enough, but, once we all got into it, I realized that this sort of collaboration taught me some valuable communication skills. We eventually were given very clear directions that surprisingly spurred a great deal more conversation on important subjects and went beyond that in reaching out to other people on the internet for their input and research. We also were encouraged to use media sources in our posts and they turned out to be surprisingly effective tools for analysis.  Several of the assignments posted there are formative, building up to our final research paper by using an informal platform to express our idea and comment on others. I saw this as very effective blog use, but can view our blog here and judge for yourself.   (Maybe even try using the PIC-RAT model how well this teacher used the internet as a tool for research and communication.)

Blogs can be used in the classroom for a variety of purposes, whether you merely run a class blog for posting announcements and instruction, create place to collect and discuss work, or have for your students to run their own.   (Here is a selection of examples of classroom blogs).  They are something that teachers should really become familiar with.  But of course, it will always be important to judge the relevance that these projects will have to our students. We learn from Kadjer that “We must think carefully about how and why we want students to engage with digital writing,” meaning we need to confer with students and use their knowledge without research to find out the best ways to help with digital learning.  As we carefully consider how to blog, though, we can use this powerful tool to transform the way learning happened for our classes.