Using blogs in schools

 Group 1 tools - Online spaces- Wikispaces, blogs for learning and websites

PMI Investigating using blogs for learning – My experiences
Plus	Minus	Interesting
·         Digital learning environment for ‘digital natives’ ·         Multimodal technology, not much can’t be embedded or uploaded to a blog. What can’t be shared here can be linked to on other webhosting sites of spaces. ·         Allows for learners to interact with each other’s ideas through the use of reading and commenting on each other’s blogs. ·         Could be used to prompt users to reflect on their learning in a journaling style. ·         Allows for ‘publishing’ of student work in a real world context. ·         Allows for linking globally to other learners, through following.	·         Work on a blog is automatically ‘published’ to the world wide web. This has implications in terms of privacy settings, ethical behaviour and copyright law in terms of what can be shared and published from a school context. ·         Publishing to a blog allows for work to be seen with little control over privacy setting. In a learning environment this could be a challenge for some students who are not comfortable at displaying their work in such exposed environments. ·         Blogging can take a lot of time, to learn and use all the features. It also requires students to have access to digital environments and the resources to support this. ·         Learning managers may have little control over the content of the students’ blogs unless using a platform that allows them some sort of administrative control. Ideally this should not pose any problems however I can see that there could be situations in a school setting where blog posts may require moderation.	·         Blogs are hugely popular with blogs covering every topic imaginable ( I believe!) ·         Blogs are created everyday on many different sites. ·         Blogs can become careers for some people.  ·         Or springboards to other things, like writing print books or movies ( Julie and Julia with Meryl streep impressed me with its connection to a humble blog ). ·         Blogs seem to have been around for more than a decade now http://www.zdnet.com/news/blogs-turn-10-whos-the-father/151564 With no one in particular recognisable as the ‘first blogger”.

 Another perspective on blogging can be found here...
http://beyond-school.org/2008/05/01/for-the-roses-my-latest-position-on-classroom-blogging/

It is a very interesting position that seeks to value writing, and argues that using blogs as a tool to magically encourage teenagers to write is flawed. Instead the author seems to suggest that writers write, and when given a blog writers blog, because it is another platform in  which to write. That makes complete sense really. the author goes further to criticize homework blogs as a useless way to encourage writing. He classes himself as an 'elitist' English teacher because of his stance that it's the flowering writers that we ought to be interested in really. As a learning manager, although not in a high school situation,  I am not sure I agree wholeheartedly....my first thought is that we as teachers need to carry along all students with us upstream rather than just leave behind those not 'capable/passionate' .

I also wonder if the use of blogging will magically open doors for those who wouldn't otherwise write as it can invite so many other senses and the use of a keyboard/other tools rather than a pen - I heard a story recently about someone who was illiterate until he discovered he could use a keyboard successfully and is now learning to communicate with written language via the internet in ways he never was able to using pen and paper....

Another reason why I think I could embrace blogs in my classroom is because of the simple fact that not all blogs need to contain a large amount of writing, or indeed 'writer's writing' for that matter. A blog in any case can be what you make it.  The variety of opportunities could see blogs being useful tools in many classroom situations and for many different learners, natural writers or not.

I believe a certain amount of scaffolding would be needed to use blogs in classroom situations. The ethics regarding what can be used on a blog and the netiquette required in an online space is one area of prior knowledge that I think it would be the learning manager's responsibility to explicitly teach before using blogs within a classroom.  Copyright law has provisions for using certain material in educational context however password protection and privacy settings are an important part of doing this safely and within the law.
Similarly to this the form of blog would need to be established.