Definition
A blog is a reflective space for students or teachers to publish content in a chronological fashion. It is a good way of sharing thoughts with students, or creating homework tasks. Most blogs allow students to comment on blog posts, which is a useful way to seek feedback.
Why Use Blogs In Education (sourced from - http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogs-in-education.html)
- Because blogs are connected, they can foster the development of a learning community. Authors can share opinions with each other and support each other with commentary and answers to questions. For example, the University of Calgary uses blogs to create learning communities.
- Additionally, blogs give students ownership over their own learning and an authentic voice, allowing them to articulate their needs and inform their own learning. Blogs have been shown to contribute to identity-formation in students. (Bortree, D.S., 2005).
- Further, blogging gives students a genuine and potentially worldwide audience for their work. Having such an audience can result in feedback and and greatly increase student motivation to do their best work. Students also have each other as their potential audience, enabling each of them to take on a leadership role at different times through the course of their learning.
- Moreover, blogging helps students see their work in different subjects as interconnected and helps them organize their own learning. Working with the teacher and informed by blogs authored by experts in the field, students can conduct a collective enquiry into a particular topic or subject matter creating their own interpretation of the material.
- Blogs teach a variety of skills in addition to the particular subject under discussion. Regular blogging fosters the development of writing and research skills. Blogging also supports digital literacy as the student learns to critically assess and evaluate various online resources.
Practical examples to support learning
http://welkerswikinomics.com/blog/ This is a very in-depth website for Economics students. Several teachers post items to the website which allow students to develop a deep understanding of a concept and then submit some discussion questions through the comment function.
http://kerileebeasley.com/ - this is another blog which gives personal reflection from a eLearning facilitator and PYP teacher.
ISS eLearning Blog this is a place where I occasionally post thoughts and activities relating to eLearning. Sometimes it can be a little bit hard to find information in a blog but the common tool is to tag pages according to themes and content. In the eLearning blog there are a series of tags down the right hand side which allow you to filter to find content.
http://inside.isb.ac.th/rm210/ Grade 3 Class Blog from International School of Bangkok
http://inside.isb.ac.th/rm210/blogging-guidelines/ - Individual student blogs from the above Grade 3 class
Exercises to try
NOVICE
- Watch the CommonCraft Blog Video above.
- Open our ISS Apple Blog and Wiki pages - http://wiki.iss.edu.sg
- Then sign-in using your school username and school password.
- You will need to click the left icon to open the blog pages
- Click on extreme left to view your personal blog.
- Click on the + button to add a post to your page.
APPRENTICE
- Complete all of the novice tasks above.
- Add a link to your blog post, add a picture to your blog post.
- Copy the link from your blog post to StudyWiz using the information tool
- Ask another teachers in the class to navigate and find your blog
PRACTITIONER 
- Beyond the ISS Apple Blog you can create your own external blog for subjects of for particular topics.
- The easiest option is to use https://www.blogger.com/ or http://wordpress.com/
- You will need to sign-up to either of these website using your staff email address.
- You can choose the level of privacy for your blog. The best solution for school would be to keep it private and email invitations to students using their ISS Gmail addresses.
EXPERT
- See if you can find a blog from another teacher in a similar area of interest to you.
- Copy the RSS feed from their blog into your Entourage or Mail application. In mail click on the small + icon at extreme bottom left then add RSS feed.
- This feature will put any blog post into your email box so that you can read it at your leisure.
Further reading/exploration
Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcast and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom (from Pg 32)
