The 5 Don’ts of Classroom Blogging
I found this article on T.H.E Journal, it stood out to me as I found lots of articles about the benefits of blogging and I thought it would be interesting to see waht some of the “don’ts” would be.
1.. DON’T just dive in.
This is an obvious don’t, if you do want to use a blog with yoiur students it is crucial to set guidelines and expectations, if you fail to do so your blog will not have the value of a blog with structure, this is not to say that you are forcing students to write a certain way, but that you simply set out what is appropriate, what you want the blog to show and that it have educational value, if students are not given guidelines, the blog will not be as valuable.
2. DON’T confuse blogging with social networking.
Blogging is not the same as myspace or facebook, it has a purpose and is not a social networking tool, although you can communicate through blogs this is not the sole purpose of a blog.
3. DON’T leap at the freebies.
Although I feel that you must research and trial all programs before using them with the class, i don’t agree that free resources and blogs aren’t as good as ones you must pay for, as I am thrilled with edublogs and have not recieved any spam since i signed up with the site. So yes, I think it is important to research the sites and resources that you use but I don’t think that there is a problem with free resources, provided that they do have educational value.
4. DON’T force a sequential style.
I think this is really important, as forcing a certain style of writing or critcising student’s writing can discourage their participation in a blog. Students will not feel encouraged to write and contribute if they feel daunted by how they have to write and are worried that they will be criticised for making errors. As I found in a previous article (All The Worlds a Stage) students were writing works to be viewed by an older class, and posting them on blogs, and the idea that high school students were reading their year 5 works made the students take extra care and put in more effort in their writing as they wanted to show their best work for the older students. This shows that if the students know theire work is being shown to others, they will want to put extra effort and care into their work to be able to show the quality of their work, so there is no need to force extra pressure onto students.
5. DON’T leave the blogging to the students.
It is important for you as the teacher be involved in the blogging, not simly by editing and monitoring the blog, but by being involved in it. Make posts for students to comment on and commment on students blogs. The article gave an example where a teacher would make posts on a class blog and other teachers as well as students would comment and share their views on the posts, this created communication between all groups, and students enjoyed being able to communicate with their teachers and peers on the views posted by the teacher.
Overall, i found this article to be of good use as it gave me some guidelines on what to consider when blogging in an educational environment.
