Using blogging in Education!

Blogging in the library

I stumbled upon a perfect article that discussed blogging relevance in education, written by a school librarian. Blogging seems to be seen as one of the many social networking systems that doesn’t need to be taught about in schools. 

The belief seems to be that blogging can be done outside of school and kid’s can discover it on their own at that time. However, not only are some students without access to online technology outside of school, they have no proper way to learn about or use blogs. There is no one standing beside them to guide them through the appropriate steps and educate them. Even kids who are deep in technology outside of school are surprised about how much they don’t know about what they don’t know. Safety on the internet and accessibility of information are just among a few examples.

 If we don’t take the opportunity to teach about blogging inside of schools we are missing out on opportunities to teach about the use of blogs and how to use future networking tools in a safe and responsible manner.



The Prose (and a Few Cons, Too) of Blogging

This article suggests that kids are into technology; why not use it to our advantage in gaining their interest. Educational blogging advocates argue that blogging often and making constant comments on other blogs could improve student writing. It is a great way for students to write all day long and flush out ideas and easily gain teacher feedback. It is still seen that blogging is a newer concept in education, so there is no real extensive research supporting the value of it. It needs to be stressed however, that blogging won’t solve the problem alone, but could be weaved among other writing tools into a program.       

Blogging could be used as a tool for writing as well as for reading. It could involve many in writing process throughout each step of writing, editing, commenting, revising, publishing, etc.

               There are still negative drawbacks concerning the fact that blogging is still a social networking system which can pose a problem for student’s safety.