What's a blog?

Hello everybody again! 

If you are here, it’s because you have read my first entry.

 

Today we will be talking about Blogging and how useful could be to use it in the classroom as a tool. But first of all, what is a blog? A blog is a virtual space where you can post different things that will be available for people who have access to Internet. The entries will be shown by chronological order and you update it daily.

  Using it as a classroom tool has its advantages. As you can see in http://ictsilviaartero.blogspot.com/ , blogs are a great idea to keep in touch with the student’s families because you can post information about the course and the tasks the students have to complete, and they can comment it. Moreover, the blog can be useful to encourage communication between children as well. Including technologies in our programme could be a way of motivating students; they use social media every day and now, blogs can be used in two ways: as an incentive to collaborate in the classroom and as a compliment of the teacher’s work. The idea of encouraging children to participate can be also found in Teaching Guidelines from the European Project LTE: Guidelines and Lesson Plans: shy children will feel more confident if they talk on the blog than if they had to do it in the classroom.

"Even many people who are anti-social in face-to-face, 

offline settings enjoy interacting online through social networks 

using their true identities or anonymous personas. 

Since a blog is a social tool, creating or reading blogs

 provides them with a better alternative method 

for interacting with others that did not previously exist."

Source: https://makeawebsitehub.com/what-is-a-blog/

  Blogging offers diverse possibilities. You can create a blog as a teacher and lead the lesson by it, or just use your blog to give information about CLIL, like http://clilforsuccess.blogspot.com/p/why-clil.html does. But students can also create a blog for themselves in small groups or individually. In that case, they will be working together or they will personalise their own blog. This task will ‘guide students to online resources’ (Teaching Guidelines) for their level, which is important, they need to be skilled in technology. They can organise the blog in Units and show what they have done and add links to other blogs of their interest, as you can see in http://bibliopoemes.blogspot.com/.

  Evaluating this would be easy; it can be taken as an online portfolio of the written work. In addition, this kind of project can have an interdisciplinary approach since other subjects can participate on the creation.

"Blog writing is informal, unlike academic writing, which may be intimidating to some, if not all, of your students. Blog writing takes the pressure off of writing and gives your students a voice in a safe environment, even if you or your students stepping out of your comfort zone." 

Source: https://elearningindustry.com/how-to-use-blogs-in-the-classroom

In essence, there are plenty reasons to begin blogging with your students. If there’s a respectful climate in the classroom, with certain rules, everything would be fine.

"Aside from being a perfect way to exercise crucial writing and communication skills, it also promotes critical thinking. With classroom blogging conversation on your class content becomes broader since it provides your kids with an excellent peer-to-peer contact platform."

Source: https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/start-classroom-blogging