Blogs provide an authentic working environment in which students are involved in activities that generate real reading and writing skills using a medium that they are comfortable with and perhaps even more confident about. One presupposes though that the students are extremely comfortable with the use of the Internet and there is some degree of maturity and confidentiality due to the sensitive nature of some of the posts. Hence, the development of the reading and writing activities may vary according the age group that is being engaged.
The teacher is able to give over ownership of the interactions to students, but this may require some specific guidelines and rubrics to ensure that students remain on task. Blogs allow for the addition of hyperlinks to support the conversation, dialogue, reading or writing activities and the insertion of other Internet or web resources. Conventions and meanings can be socially constructed and collaborative in nature, this can enable students to develop writing skills that range from basic social interactions to the creation of scholarly material using various sources as supporting evidence.They allow for critical and reflective reading and writing experiences. They also give teachers the opportunity to scaffold reading activities thus, allowing students to be engaged at a level most appropriate for the students.
Blogs can be creatively used by teachers to bring students beyond the limits of their classrooms and enter into an experience of the world. This requires greater preparation by teachers and may also be quite time consuming initially. The lack of resources is another possible drawback to having such a reading and writing forum, integral to this is availability of personnel with the necessary technical support and knowledge to maintain and supervise blogs. In essence the use of blogs can be an enriching experience.
I have taken a great interest in blogs but, as you rightly pointed out, the lack of adequate computers, as in my school, as well as the absence of an internet service has made the use of this quite impossible. What I have done though is tried to use it at home with my daughter and also with other family members. I must say that they LOVE IT!
ReplyDeleteI noticed how you aptly referred to blogs as “an authentic working environment.” This is so true. I see blogs as a way of getting our pupils to collaborate on a higher level. By reading each others ideas they will get a variety of perspectives which they will then have to analyze and perhaps come to some sort of conclusion. We can safely say then, that blogs can play an integral role in the constructivist classroom whereby pupils construct their own knowledge.
In keeping with the whole notion of constructivism, the teacher takes on the role of facilitator. Yet, the teacher has to set proper guidelines and rubrics in order to get a high quality of blogs or else it may just turn out to be a sort of “chat room.”