BLOG CAN BE USED TO TEACH STUDENTS

Blog have the potential to expand students’ creativity, not to mention their writing skills. Today’s students are fast adapting to the digital world and thus expect their teachers to be abreast with the technologies of today’s learning process.

Reading and writing is a form of education that helps students to improve in their writing skills. Writing for yourself or your teacher is good on itself but publishing your written works for people to comment, criticize and read poses some challenge for students.

Fortunately for teachers, blogs are surprisingly easy to use, especially Google blog (www.blogger.com). They require minimum easy technical knowledge and are quickly and easily created and maintained. Students will be able to pick up how to use blogging platforms with minimal technical assistance and teachers will enjoy the ease in the initial setup.

Unlike many traditional Websites, blogs are flexible in design and can be changed relatively easily. Best of all, students and teachers will find them convenient and accessible via any computer or mobile device.

Blog is a web content management system that helps in information sharing. This functionality can be exploited by teachers in Nigeria with their students in classroom. As a teacher, classroom blog is used to understand how your students can articulate, analyse and write a blog post about different issues.

WHY BLOGGING IS GREAT FOR STUDENTS

1. Blogs allow for Multi-faceted learning

Educators need to teach important materials in several ways because each one of our students learns differently. What’s more, we also need to provide students with multiple ways to engage with assignments, based on their individual talents. Blogging is one technique for doing so, as it can allow a quieter student, for example, to feel heard online. Those shy and quiet students feel less pressure when they need to “speak” in their blog or when giving peer feedback, as they are discussing the text on their own terms. Additionally, this journaling format works great with read-and-write learners as well as visual learners.

2. Blogs promote Literacy and Sharpen Writing Skills

Blogging gives students an opportunity to become published authors and showcase their writing skills. In addition, blogs give students the ability to improve communication and collaboration through the commenting features. Peer review and feedback become invaluable part of the writing process. Students from other part of the world can also comment and provide a new cultural perspective to our own students’ thoughts and opinions. Students’ writing skills are vastly improved through the blogging process, since they have to work harder to hold the readers’ attention. To do that, every word, phrase, sentence and even punctuation mark must be add something to the posting.

3. Blogs are Accessible and Engaging

With the availability of blog apps, blogging has become very simple and accessible to our students. They can blog from anywhere about anything whenever they are in the mood to reflect. They are not tied down to a desk and feel freer using media. Also, in the age where every person has a camera in their pocket, we have become a society that journals through photography and video. Along with other multimedia artifacts, blog become more engaging and almost interactive for the readers.

4. Blogs Can Serve as a Classroom Management Tool

When used as an in-class assignment, blogs can keep your students on task and focused. The more blogs students post, the more opportunities they have for others to comment on their blog. It’s an exciting feeling for students to see proof of someone reading their published work, taking time to reflect on it, and posting their opinion or question. Creating a classroom blog instead of individual blogs fosters an online community for your students to extend the classroom beyond the 4 walls.

The learning continues wherever they go and their thoughts and conversations keep going. Blogging is a great tool to create students portfolios, as it can be used both as a “learning portfolio” and a “showcase portfolio”.

A blog post can range from general topic; perceived experience; activities in classroom and daily diary. By setting out guidelines and rules, your students will learn how to proof-read and preview their works before publishing.

Other students are encourage to leave a positive comments, feedbacks and constructive arguments on each post. It will help increase inter-classroom communication between students and help them learn from each other.

There are free available blog publishing software you can use and many blogs are self-hosted. There are many companies that provide free hosting for education and classroom blog. You can check out blogging platforms like blogger, wordpress, 21clases, edublogs.

Depending on the grade of students you teach, most blogging platforms have privacy and security settings. You can restrict external contributions outside the class from writing post or comments. You can also use a filter mechanism to filter all posts and comments before publishing.

Using blogs as a form of teaching can also give parents the opportunity to see what is going on in the classroom with their kids.

Classroom blogs can be used to pass information to students, inform students of class requirements, handouts, notices and homework assignments, or acts as a question and answer board.

Many blog platforms are very easy to learn and use. Depending on the blog platform you choose, you should make sure that your students understand how to use it.