Educational blogging is the new wave in education. It can be used as a sounding board, a classroom bulletin board, a planning station for group projects, or for assignment clarification. Blogs can also be used to find information. The site http://www.kqed.org/arts/?gclid=CM-tpvzcyJsCFRIeDQodzGf1Jg is an arts current events blog. It poses critical thinking questions and articles. There are similar sites out there for every subject matter. Discussion and questions are highly recommended.
Blogs create a discussion board for the topic at hand. In this site, http://thoughtsonteaching-jdunlap.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-blogs-with-students.html, a teacher explains how she uses blogs to engage her students in a classroom community on-line. She also describes how using blogging in her class has lead to deep discussions and reflective thinking in and among her students.
Universities are making good use of blogging as a means of “flexible delivery” (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/13066/1/13066.pdf) of class material. Power points, lecture notes, web links, and past exam papers can be posted to give students every opportunity to do well in class. They are also used as a reflective journaling tool with the purpose of sharing and discussing ideas; however, as discussed by J. David Betts, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.1802&rep=rep1&type=pdf, that is not always how it works. Students are sometimes reluctant to share their thoughts with others and in turn discuss another student’s ideas. If a professor or teacher wants students to use a blog in this way, they have to weave it into the requirements of the course, or it may not happen.
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