What is Blogging? Why use it in Education? How do we do it?
These are the questions I asked when myself and a colleague were looking at using 'Blogs' at our school. Especially......Why use it?. I hope this post may help you start this blogger journey or get a better feel for Blogging in Education.
What is Blogging?
Before this the question we need to ask is "What is a BLOG?".The word comes from the expression 'WEB LOG' and is a discussion or information entered as 'Posts'; this is published on the World Wide Web.
When you work on a blog and using all the skills when editing a blog you are BLOGGING. Blogs can be personal or corporate and organisational and come in many media forms: for example written, photos, sketches etc.
Most of us in education use a CMS (Content Management System) to help use create, edit, manage and publish our blogs on the World Web. If we didn't use a CMS we would have to deal with coding every page....and as educators we have no time to deal with that.
Below is a good link that looks at some of the best CMS for creating a Blog.
Word Press is the most popular and has plenty of add ons and extras that make for some very high level presentations.
I have found in NZ Schools, due to many using Google and Google management systems like 'Teacher Dashboard', use Blogger. It is hosted and is very easy to use, perfect for schools.
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LMS (Learning Management Systems) also provide the chance for students to 'Blog' as well.
Why use it in Education?
Blogger utilises many skills and is a very 21st Century resource to learning. Students need to learn the skills of blogging, the technical skills, communication skills and visual presentation skills.
Then it's Blogging for a reason that supports the learning experience happening in the class.
Before starting we did a lot of work and had plenty of discussion around 'What is Blogging, and being a digital citizen when contributing and being part of a huge community of online contributions.
There are also age recommendations. Wordpress says 13 years of age. To have a Google account you must be 13, that is why schools with Year 8 students and under really need a school domain. Recommendations for Google+ and Blogger is 13+ I am lead to believe.
Why we implemented Blogging:
Our pedagogy was driven by a lot of Guy Claxton's work (which I have talked about in other posts) and one of the fundamental traits students should exercise to build learning power is REFLECTION.
Therefore, we were going to use Blogs as a way for students to reflect on their learning.
How do (did) we do it?
This needs to be answered with two separate questions:
1. How do we implement it into our class program?
2. How do we do implement it Technically into our class?
Implementing Blogs in our class program was just one part of our whole google vision or plan. it was one piece of the jigsaw. We spent plenty of time with both teachers and students working on Google Drive applications before we started with Blogs.
The process or long term plan of getting our students effectively blogging.
- We ran what we called a 'Discovery Week' where we had a context and students could personalise their learning around this. Communication was the key word specially looking at different types of media, messages, beliefs, opinions and how they are conveyed. Great place for them to start understanding the power of the word and the many ways available to us to have our voice, thoughts and interests heard.
- We then introduced what Blogs are and what is 'Blogging, and how personnel blogs were a great way to write reflections (we had discussed already on what 'Reflection' looks, feels and sounds like earlier in the year). We brainstormed why Blogs are such an exciting and useful tool to use for reflecting on ones learning:
- Add photos
- Add Links
- Video reflections
- Diagrams
- Graphs
- Websites
- Youtube etc etc
- Sharing/feedback
- We had Friday rotations over the Term. One of the rotations looked at the technical skills of setting up and personalising a blog (front loading).
- Before long the students were away and laughing!
Its also important to note we also got the staff to reflect on their own learning/practice to use for their own Professional learning and Teacher Registration documentation.
Now this was the big one for me ........ How do we do it Technically? I will put this into a separate Post. Have fun and please comment or point readers to other places for information on blogging in education.
