Monday, October 15, 2012

Why are blogs good? What can they do in a classroom?

Why are blogs good for a classroom?  

What can they do for my students?


"They [bloggers] take a highly active role in the production of texts and the distribution of information compared to writers in the past." (Penrod)

Four things that blogging can encourage:

  1. Blogging encourages fluency in writing
  2. Blogging encourages cooperative learning
  3. Blogging encourages critical thinking
  4. Blogging encourages performance based learning, PBL, among other cross-curricular strategies.
  (Penrod, 22-24)

1. Blogging encourages fluency in writing.

http://budgetmaven.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/writing-on-a-budget/
Students get the chance to write a lot with blogging.  They have the chance to do all levels of writing but mostly at L1 and L2.  By using blogging students can type and express themselves in a medium that they feel comfortable with.  

2. Blogging encourages cooperative learning.


This plays into class discussions.  Blogging can help students learn together by having them respond to each others comments and create a virtual class discussion.  
"Blogging encourages cooperative learning through the feedback loop.  As students post to others' sites, a form of collective intelligence develops about topic...Students find out that no single person knows everything and shared inquiry helps everyone uncover more useful information and knowledge." (Penrod, 23)  

3. Blogging encourages critical thinking.


One of the main aspects about blogging is reading other's work.  By reading other's work a person must evaluate what they have read and decide how this piece should be interpreted.  Students in engage in critical thinking when reading blogs, because they must synthesize their reading, and try to understand what the author desires to communicate.  The teacher is not right there hinting the meaning or the information that should be understood, students have to do this themselves.  It gives them a sense of autonomy in developing their own literacy.  
"Because students have to discern the information they unearth about a topic and then write about it using language so others can understand, student bloggers have to learn how to ask good questions in order to evaluate information or become better researchers in order to make certain assessments." (Penrod, 23)

4. Blogging encourages PBL among other cross-curricular strategies.


The strategies picked up from blogging can transfer for many students.  For most students they see writing in a classroom and think English=writing.  But writing takes place in many other subjects and teachers struggle to get kids to realize that the skills they pick up in English can even be transferred to a Biology class.  In blogging they have some freedom of expression and create their own "writing environment" so they can start to see that writing can be used everywhere.
"While writing pedagogy argues that student writers should develop some portable or transferable skill, practicing writing to a prompt or in response to reading does little to encourage writers' skill transference." (Penrod, 24)
Of course in a literature class using prompts is necessary many times, but students should experience some kind of writing freedom.  Like encouraging life long readers, we want to encourage our students to be people who are not afraid of writing

  



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