Weblogs in the Classroom

Weblogs are extremely useful tools for bringing student work to a larger audience without requiring students (or teachers for that matter) to have a lot of technical expertise. Many weblog packages such as Moveable Type, Greymatter, Blogger, and Radio UserLand (the one used for this Weblog) are free, or cost very little to set up. They require some initial struggle understanding the front end tech requirements, but for the day-to-day publishing of thoughts, stories, links, etc, the software is relatively easy to use, as a class of elementary school students demonstrated in the UK. Their teacher describes her understanding of the benefits of weblogging in the classroom below:

I quickly came to the conclusion that the benefits of exposing students writing and work to a wider audience was far, far greater than the relatively small risks. In fact the 'audience' factor was the key motivation for my students writing. I think that is what makes weblogs so brilliant in education. My children were writing for a real audience, the success of which they could measure through the responses and the site statistics. Without this wider audience the project would have gone 'flat'. An incidental point was the fact that the audience thing really impressed the parents more than anything else. Which parent would fail to be impressed when their child's writing was linked to UC Berkeley for example ?

How might the students we work with in the Chicago Public Schools benefit from this type of publishing? Considering that original student work is so important in inquiry-based instruction we use, blogging could provide a powerful method to support the sharing of student work as drafts for comment and correction, as thoughts and reflection on the work, and as final projects for general consumption. What do you think?

11:21:37 AM