Seven Reasons to Blog with your Students

This week I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the use of technology in the classroom to help meet learning goals. The chapter I  read as an assignment for my grad class focused on evaluation of educational technology software and integration strategies. One of the activities focused on blogging as a class activity.

One of the reasons I started this blog was the 30 Day Kickstart Your Blog challenge. Looking back, I did post nearly weekly during the first parts of this year, but like many resolutions, the will fizzled and here I am! (Sorry to those WELSTech listeners who were hoping for more entries! I hope this encourages you!)

The reason I mention the 30-Day challenge is that the same author did a series of posts on how to start Blogging with Students. In the post I linked, there are links to each entry in the series of posts about student blogging.

So why should students blog?

  1. Blogging causes students to think for themselves and to formulate an opinion.
  2. It allows students to dig deeper into topics in which they may have only recently developed an interest.
  3. It allows students to interact globally. Not just that, but maybe even with other students in their class or school that they didn’t talk to before.
  4. It allows students to be creative in the way they present and teach others about topics that interest them.
  5. It offers the opportunity to create information in a digital format (which most consider more “their thing” anyway). Digital natives, anyone?
  6. Blogging allows for collaborative learning. Students can be facilitators of learning to each other as they present topics of interest to them.
  7. Parents can easily see what the students are writing and what they’re spending time on while they’re at school.

This is by no means a comprehensive list.  These are just things that I thought about as to why a blogging program would be good in school. Blogging can be integrated into nearly any curriculuar area – another reason why it’s so neat!

One of the challenges that I’ve encountered with blogging in the past is evaluation. If you have blogged with students before, do their blogs get formally evaluated? Do you use a rubric or is there another way you assess? Comments would be much appreciated!

Have a blessed Holy Week, and keep His song in your heart!

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2 thoughts on “Seven Reasons to Blog with your Students

  1. Luke

    You’re back! Hopefully this isn’t just a coda. 🙂

    How would you use blogging in a math class? I can easily see it in social studies and English classes, but not so much in math, unless it’s word problems that the students themselves challenge each other with.

    We’ve done this in my master’s program and it didn’t go over too well, but I suspect that has more to do with our perception of what class is and isn’t. Personally, I rather enjoyed it.

    Reply

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