Blogs have become an important tool in education. A quick search on Google returns 299,000,000 sites related to the subject. They have been used in the classroom from elementary to graduate school and are an important resource for supporting teachers and other professionals. When I was teaching middle school English in a class for kids with learning disabilities I used the creation of blogs not only as a way to reinforce writing skills but also as an introduction to the use of html in the creation of web pages and as a way to change the appearance of individual blogs in ways that went beyond the standard templates provided by blog hosting sites. Blogging gave my students the ability to share their work with not only me and the other students in the classroom but with parents and the wider world as well. I had a vague idea of the social implications of blogging but didn’t fully realize the value of blogging as a part of a new definition of literacy as discussed in Davies and Merchant’s book Web 2.0 for Schools (2009). This new literacy isn’t strictly limited to text but extends to technology and social participation that isn’t limited to face-to-face interaction and specific physical location, but extends throughout the world via the web. What I did realize was the value of giving a sense of ownership of their work to the students as well giving them the ability to be creative in ways beyond the printed word. In the years that have passed since I first used blogs in the classroom the amount and variety of blogs has exploded and have truly become a resource of great potential in the education of the students of the 21st century.
References
Davies, J., Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for schools. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
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