Let's get blogging

Millions of people around the world engage in blog (web log) writing. It has been a dominant feature of the internet since the late 1990s and essentially, at its most simple, gives an opportunity for us to put our thoughts and reflections down in writing. Blogs can also contain other forms of media such as pictures and video and often include interactive elements which facilitate sharing and commenting. Blogging is at the heart of social networking and popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter have fed off this demand to capture and share thoughts and experiences. Blogging suffers from the usual problems of having a saturated market, especially one which is completely open and free of editing, i.e. the quality of blogs can vary from the sublime to the ridiculous.

In terms of education, as Donald Clark has recently written about, blogging has the potential to be of great benefit to both students and educators. Teachers can use blogs to summarise content that has been covered in the lesson; this has value for students who wish to revisit the learning to check understanding, who have missed lessons, or to aid home learning or revision. Geography teacher, Millie Watts, uses a blog for precisely this as well incorporating more sophisticated tools such as live blogging (using Coveritlive) which allows her to conduct revision sessions through a live stream. At The John Warner School we are using Google+ to engage with A Level students. Having trialled other social networking sites in the past Google+ appears to benefit from its relative lack of popularity, students don’t feel like they’re mixing school with social lives, as well as its direct links with Youtube and a generally more professional look and feel.

The opportunity for students to write their own blogs is possibly even more exciting as they are engaging more actively in their own learning. Social networks like Google+ encourage students to interact but their contributions are generally brief and probably not revisited. A student who is encouraged to write a fuller blog of their own will be recording and reflecting on their learning, will be encouraged to collaborate with others and will be able to easily access their blogs at a later date for the purposes of revision. As Donald Clark writes, this is a hugely untapped resource and one which schools should be encouraging and facilitating while not making the assumption that because young people are ‘digital natives’ they already know about and use blogs – they probably don’t.

We have just signed the whole school up for Google accounts which will give all students and staff access to Blogger, one of the many free blogging sites that exist. Let’s get blogging!