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Modern blogging is
more than just keeping a pen and paper journal. And these potential difficulties
lead you to asking the question, “To blog or not to blog?” Start with evaluating
existing blogs by asking questions like:
(1) What’s it about
and what themes are covered?
(2) Who is the
intended audience for the blog?
(3) What features
are included?
For example, let’s
analyze Nik’s Learning Technology Blog:
(1) Learning technologies
websites, applications and the classroom usage of these tools.
(2) Language teachers interested
in learning technologies.
(3) Commenting / Polls / Most read / Links / Past postings / RSS / Links to
microblogs (Plurk, Twitter) / Downloads / The opportunity to ask a question, etc.
Answering these
questions, you can identify whether you will need a blog in your professional
activity or not and on the other hand, you can use these questions as some sort
of guidelines for your own blog.
Before you start personalizing
your front page, let us figure out the key features of blogging. In my opinion,
some of them are the following:
comments by other
people who are interested in this topic: it develops closer relationships among students and
also with the teacher since it brings the discussion out of the official
classroom setting and relaxes the ‘teacher – student’ tension;
personal opinions
on a particular subject: it encourages individual research and develops critical thinking and
writing skills; it encourages more responsibility for the written assignment
because it is going to be read by the student’s classmates;
links to previous posts: it organizes the content and
gives a good opportunity to easily find (or redirect your student to) the
necessary information / material;
links to external websites: it provides space to collect
all necessary links in one place and later on to use them quickly and
comfortably at any necessary moment;
can include text, pictures,
videos, and / or audio: all these resources are a part of the modern teaching process, and
blogging gives an excellent opportunity to use them and involve students in
various kinds of discussions and tasks.
You
may ask students to create their own blogs. It can be very productive because
they can apply their IT skills to make their posts stand out from others. It
will look more appealing than simple text blog posts. Students can illustrate
their stories with pictures of where they have been or of what they have done.
Depending on the task, they can attach a video or an audio file to personalize
their post.
In
my personal experience I have used my blog for different types of activities,
for example:
or
and so on.
Now I would really like to continue the topic by inviting everyone to
contribute your ideas to the following:
Imagine you are trying to persuade a colleague
to use blogs in his / her teaching. What arguments will you use to achieve your
goal? Your ideas are very welcome here!Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
