Week 3 - Reflection

Week 3:  Using blogs for teaching and learning

Reading and writing texts online are basic skills that students need to know in these days. Teaching with blogs provides the opportunity to engage students in these activities. The students can publish their writing easily and share them with an authentic audience. Once a student posts an entry, others in the class can respond, providing supportive feedback, and offering additional suggestions.

Blogs can create the needed sense of community for the classroom.  Blogs provide students the opportunity to think critically about issues and construct understanding together.  This technological tool can help to change the traditional teacher-centered classroom into a student-driven environment. The students can combine their actual form of communication to discuss traditional topics like the US Civil War, making them more interested in learning. They may be more motivated to care about the quality of their writing as they will want to communicate their thoughts precisely to avoid misunderstanding.  In addition, the ability to respond and comment on each other’s posts may lead to more discussion than the traditional classroom manner because all can participate instead of just a few talking during the class period. As Richard Byrne says Blog discussions provides a forum for shy students to express themselves with written words instead of possibly staying out of a in-classroom.

Richard Byrne established the three goals for classroom blogs: distribution, discussion, and demonstration. He named both three as blogging framework.

About Distribution blogs I would like to implement a very efficient one at school. In my opinion the school's resources are very important in the child's education, but we need the parental involvement, because it is an essential element to complete the education cycle, and I if we have an excellent communication channel with parents we can motivate them  not only in their child's education issues but also in all the school activities and projects.

About Discussion blogs I would like to implement some that can motivate students, because I like History and Math, and I know that is hard to engage students in this kind of subjects. We need a plus of creativity to success on it. Could be some relaxed blogs without complicated terms like to be in a summer camp and learn interesting things at the same time.

Demonstration blogs is the key to close the circle. I would like to implement one that give us back the needed information not only to know about the part where we are getting good results but also to know the part where we need to put more attention in order to elevate the education quality.