The Functionality of a Blog

Image Courtesy of Kaushik.net

A blog or "web log" is, more or less, an online journal or diary which can be either personal or professional in nature.

How useful could a blog be in a classroom? A brief analysis of my thoughts on this are as follows.


Strengths:

• Allows students to learn and practise professional communication, (ie. nettique).
  
• Practises computer skills, (eg. adding an image, perhaps some basic html).
  
• Can create a link between the school and home environments, (eg. accessing homework task instructions from home).
  
• Parents can acknowledge their child's achievements from home, (eg. a child's uploaded speech podcast, drawing, photos etc).
  
• Students can experience a greater connection to the wider world (beyond their classroom and country).
  
• Students can receive answers to a common problem which they share, instead of asking and discovering the answer individually.
  
• Allows the teacher to provide further information, links and resources to assist in students' learning outside of classtime.
  
• Helps students become ICT literate, which is becoming more and more essential.
  

Weaknesses:

• Students may feel isolated if an understanding beyond the blog isn't well established in class, (eg. homework tasks should not just be left for students to try to decipher online without them firstly hearing an in-class explanation).
  
• Not all students may have access to a computer with the internet at home due to a number of issues and may fall behind because of this.
  
• At this stage, many schools still do not have an adequate number of computers to cater for all students in a class and even if they do they often experience technical issues (eg. student log in issues, battery issues etc).
  
• Some students can find it difficult to work out and read from a computer for long periods of time and are reluctant to participate to their full benefit.
  
• Even a well varied blog, which may include pictures, sounds and links to games and so on, will still lack a thorough consideration of all the multiple intelligences learning styles, (eg. kinetic).
  

Opportunities:

• To expand the learning experience beyond the classroom.
  
• To promote class pride.
  
• To connect, share and learn from each other, parents, other teachers and students etc.
  
• To offer further clarification on tasks, extra curricular activities etc.
  

Threats:

• Some threat to school, teacher and student privacy if proper nettique isn't taught, learnt and adopted.
  
• Some risk of student isolation from learning.
  
• Some risk of losing the interest of less literacy-minded, intrapersonal students.
  

Should I think of any further considerations in regards to the functionality of a classroom blog I will be sure to add them.