BP16_20091115_EducationalUsesofBlogs

After completing several other assignments, I have found many different uses for blogging in the classroom.

First of all, I would like to start a weekly blog of the high points of our classroom. Students would have access to help create the blog either in the classroom, through a group writing process, or online by adding comments to the blog. As the year progressed and students understood what makes a good blog post and get better at typing, it could be used with students as a daily motivator-having classroom reporters daily add to our blog. At times throughout the year, I would then use the Web 2.0 tool that Megan shared with us, Zinepal (zinepal.com) and print out the blogs to create our own "zine" that the students would be able to keep and also have a class copy to share with future classes.

Also, blogging lends itself to be a very nice portal to "sloppy copy writing." What I mean by this is that students who are proficient at typing (or those that aren't so proficient but want to do it) would be able to type up their "sloppy copy" or rough draft of any writing that we are completing in class and have other students add comments suggesting draft changes and allow me to do so as well and have a great paperless classroom. If I were to do this in a classroom, I would have students type it up in a word processing program and then copy and paste what they wrote into their blog. Then they would be able to make changes easily to their writing and then email the document to me.

Finally, edmodo (edmodo.com), edu2.o (http://www.edu20.org/), and Gaggle email (gaggle.net) all have a "blog like" capability. This would allow the teacher to have one site (or all three if they want) where students could "blog" about what they are learning. In edmodo and edu 2.0, they could start a discussion about the different subjects they are covering in those course management systems and use Gaggle as an online journal allowing students to post what they want and have a little fun.

Blogs have great potential to have students start to write in new and exciting ways and allow a community of writers to be created. By using a blog and a word processing program to create the posts, students have the freedom to write what they want rather than just the bare minimum knowing that changes can be done quickly and painlessly (not having to rewrite the whole piece over 10 times by hand).