Blogging In the classroom

Blogging In the classroom

Anne Davies takes huge steps further to help students to develop writing skills and critical thinking by using the blog. Nevertheless, students must be aware of using adequately this learning tool where they would share smart opinions with a worldwide audience. Anne Davies strongly believes that not just by exposing the students on blogs these skills will be developed. It is necessary the immediate teacher intervention to establish the proper methodological connections between different types of writing. She believes that teachers would have an incredible possibility to build a unique and very attractive pedagogy to teach by using blogs in the classroom.

In my opinion, I believe that as educators, facilitating and updating learning is our responsibility. Without forgetting that we also are part of this process, if we adapt new ways to make simple and interesting our daily learning exposure everybody would benefit. For example, we can promote the use of blogging inside of the classroom by creating a reflective journal. Teachers would provide information about some strategies that have worked inside of the classroom or did not work. Teachers can share this information and give an informal feedback.

As a teacher we can provide some other tips to other teachers like fun teaching activities that we can use in the classroom or simply to explore and learn important teaching techniques that many websites provide us.

If we want to create a coordinated class blog it could help us to inform the students in a very organized way about homework assignments where they have to respond on their own blogs. The coolest thing about this is that students become aware of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

The information that they post on their blogs would be visible to many people outside of the classroom or even outside of school to respond to. That kind of activity motivates to our students to be critical thinkers, but, of course, teachers must provide them with the necessary information to let them know what they are doing.

These were the activities that most interest me from this article to apply in further time in my own classroom blog setting.

Create an online book club to promote critical interactive sharing replies.

Provide online readings for your students to read and react to.

Provide vocabulary activities, which build grammar skills.

Post assignments based on literature readings and have students respond on their own weblogs, creating a kind of portfolio of their work.

Communicate with parents and promote continual interaction to their children educational development.

Build a class newsletter, promoting student-written skills and other computer learned basics.

For instance, promoting the use of blogs in the classroom it would provide an enormous opportunity for our students to interact with many people sharing their personal thoughts more constructively. Students would have access to put in practice what they have learned fostering their personal education, making it relevant.

The attributes that blogging represents to us as a teachers would revolutionize our pedagogies. We can develop strong, fun and easy access to interaction with our students, parents and other teachers with more effectiveness. Let’s try these new challenges to become better teachers.