A blog is a simple, but effective way to create a professional learning community. Like any tool, a blog may not function to its full potential unless it is used properly. I have been teaching high school students for almost a decade, so my critiques focus on how these resources would work in a high school. Let’s look at three links that can offer more insight into blogging.
This YouTube clip provides a cute, but basic explanation of what a blog is. This clip serves best as an introduction to blogging to people who are not familiar with the concept at all. In a classroom where some learners may have previous knowledge and some may not, the clip would also serve as a way to create a common base of terms and knowledge. If you are planning to use blogs in a classroom it is important for your student learners to have a common frame of reference.
The edublog.org site is one example of the many different free blog services out there. Did I say free? Few things are truly free. To get full functionality you may need to upgrade to a paid subscription. The upgrades would be most beneficial to an instructor who needs complete access to student blogs, more customization options and storage in order to create a more immersive online learning experience. However, the free version would work just fine for students who need to create an online blog cheaply and quickly.
The company’s name suggests a close tie with education and they seem to have addressed concerns many schools have regarding online content. They claim access is only provided to educators and mentions the ability to block adult content. Without an extensive test of these claims I have no way of knowing how effective they are, but it may be a selling point to some that they are at least addressing some common issues.
As stated above to get advance features you need to pay and I would advise anyone hoping to make blogging a part of their day to day classroom to research carefully what each level free to pro to campus provides. The free version does seem to provide enough options to use in a classroom to introduce the basics of blogging to students.
My final example I am sharing is what I would call a true professional blog made by Ferdinand Krauss about e-learning and instructional technology. The author shares many different reflections and ideas regarding the subject and judging by the number of comments to some posts, there is a small group that follows and contributes to his discussions. I am not going to comment on the subject material, which would be the reader’s job, but instead on the overall set up of the blog.
The first thing I noticed is the clean interface. The background is simple and it is easy to tell where one discussion starts and ends. Having a clean interface is important, especially if you are hoping to have serious and substantive discussions. A web page that is crammed full of color pictures, advertisements and windows can become difficult to navigate and tiresome to view. The easy to find links are also a plus since often the author is referencing other work to support his own ideas or to provide further learning.
In a high school I would not necessarily choose this blog as an example of content since much of the information might be a little too difficult for high school learners, but it is an excellent example of how a scholarly or professional blog should look. This is an important lesson for younger potential bloggers to learn since much of their previous experience with media like this may be through sites like Facebook. Besides the clean interface I would point out to students that the author does not waste the reader’s time with status updates about what he is doing Friday night or had for lunch. This lesson serves to remind students that the online world has many facets beyond their social life. If you want your blog to be taken seriously professionally or academically your choice of content and interface needs to reflect that.
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