Blogs are user-friendly
Blogs are a very effective way of engaging students, particularly in online classes. Blogs not only gives the students the opportunity to participate in class discussion, but they also avoid the exchange of countless e-mails that clutter mailboxes and very often go unchecked or unanswered.
Fortunately, for teachers and students, bloggging is easy to do. A blogger needs only minimal technical knowledge and blogs are friendly enough even for the techno phobic student in the class.
A colleague is currently taking an online religion class that is making use of a blog for class discussion. She is very happy with how the blog is working out. Her class blog has given students an opportunity to participate where they might not otherwise have done so. It has also been effective for collaboration and discussion.
Another nice feature of blogs is the fact that it’s often the perfect place to add a “little something” to the discussion.
Has anyone had or heard of any negative experiences using a blog as a teaching tool?
posted by Anonymous @ 9:36 AM
1 Comments:
The social tool aspect aside, blogging's simplicity and ease of use are ideal. With that said, one of the downsides of using blogger was aptly demonstrated late Wednesday and Thursday afternoon this week when service was unavailble for large chunks of time. When using blogger in class, I had students complain when service was down and there was a bit of a learning curve with 'dumped' comments and posts.
In my opinion, the negative aspects of blogging are not as pronounced when they are used in higher education. With younger students guidelines would need to be more pronounced, protection in place for their safety, and the concept of filters clearly dealt with before usage began.
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