Educational Value of Blogs

Blogs allow students and teachers with an opportunity to collaborate away from school. There are many educational values of using a blog. A blog can be designed to allow students to post questions for teachers or other students to post responses to. Students would be required to place their questioning and reasoning in written form when they post to the blog. This lets students present their ideas and forces them to analyze how their reasoning relates to a situation. Blogging should be involve just a teacher or just students. It should involve collaboration of both teachers and students. Students can post questions or comments on the blog and teachers can post answers or further comments about the students' posts. Other students can also post answers or comments to other student posts. Blogs can be integrated into the curriculum to develop a means of communication for teachers and students. One problem that I had to deal with throughout the semester was that the firewall out my school would not allow me to access a blog from school. This could create some difficulty for some students who do not have internet access at home, but if you can get permission from your school or system to allow for your blog to be accessible at school, then students and teacher, alike, will benefit from the experience.