Week 3 - Teaching Using Blogs

Using blogs as a learning tool can be a great way to see students' progress and thoughts through their learning journey. By allowing students to create their own online space and add their own individual features including images, links, colouring and backgrounds, it lets students creatively express themselves in an area of technology they can feel comfortable using. Students can also collaborate their ideas and findings to show their research skills and showcase what they have learned from the course or topic. A major advantage to using blogs as a teaching tool is that teachers can monitor what a student is adding to their blog and can monitor students' learning progress. Teachers and other students can also give comments and feedback to students online. Another advantage to using blogs is students can complete them anywhere and at anytime, so learning is not limited to the classroom. This may lead to further investigation of topics and a more in-depth analysis.

Disadvantages to using blogs may be that students are not using them appropriately for educational purposes, however if this is monitored by the teacher these problems can be easily fixed. Another disadvantage is that blogs don't give students much of a chance to work collaboratively with each other. 

There are many ways in which blogs can be used as a learning material. One way they can be used is by asking students to reflect each week on their thoughts of the learning material so far. A way this can be arranged to promote higher order thinking is by asking the students to create a KWL chart (Ogle, 1986) http://www.readingquest.org/strat/kwl.html in their blog. This allows them to express what they already know, what they want to know and what they have learnt form the topic. 

Another way blogs can be used as a learning material is by asking students to take different components from what they are learning and each week provide an analysis of each component in their blog. for example if students are learning about planets they could choose a different planet to discuss each week. 

These reflections may also help students when completing assignments as it provides them with a virtual set of notes and ideas from what they have been learning over the duration of the course.