Blogging in (and out of) the classroom

Teachers and students blogging as a part of their course work.

This week we’re going to look at the use of Blogs in the classroom as a part of the educational process - blogging as a direct part of the course experience. Next week we’ll follow this up with a list of Blogs that educators may find useful. Let’s dive in…

Teachers have been using blogs in instructional situations for years now, and the Internet abounds with postings and articles about blogging in the classroom. Many of these resources are out of date, so I spent a fair amount of time finding current references that provide useful insight into blogging activities conducted by students as part of the classroom learning experience. There are many blogs related to the educational experience (such as those focused on what’s going on in a given course, or those based on teacher’s experiences and observations) but I was interested specifically in situations in which the blogging effort required student participation, and where the process impacted the student’s learning experience.

The following links provide some insight into a variety of situations in which blogs were integrated into the course experience:

* Teacher Anne Mirtschen had her students in grades 4, 5, 8, and 9 participate in a cross cultural blogging effort involving schools here in California and Texas, reaching across the world to schools in Australia and South Korea. She provides a nice list of learning outcomes, which illustrates some of the benefits of student blogging. Read about it at http://murcha.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/blogging-across-cultures/.[Please click here to continue reading the complete post at www.EmergingEdTech.com, where I blog regularly about the use of emerging Internet technologies in the classroom. Thanks!]