The Usefulness of Blogging in Education

I see both positives and negatives to blogging, at least as an elementary educator’s tool. First of all, most of my students as well as myself have seen blogging as a person’s thoughts on a subject. Longer blogs usually mean more passion about a subject; shorter blogs are either more to the point or mean less knowledge about a subject.

In the case of these blogs, 400 words seems more like an essay on the subject, to reflect not only our knowledge but our research about a subject. And blogging is a way to share that knowledge that can draw more of an audience, granted. But this is higher education, where sharing knowledge and reflection and even starting debates is a must. In elementary education I see this being accomplished to a lesser extent for several reasons.

First and foremost, most students don’t like to do work of any kind. It has to be assigned and graded for them to do it. If it doesn’t count, as with the achievement tests, they tend not to work at it, at least in my school. We have to stress how important it is in seventh grade to raise the scores higher for the high schools to look at.

Second, students need to be taught language and sentence structure and revision before blogging can be successful to any extent. We have a very difficult time getting the students to create rough drafts, or even read over what they have typed into a word processor.

However, I think that with practice students can get better at it and turn it into what it is intended to be; a learning tool for sharing and trading and discussing ideas/topics. Especially at first, imposing some limit for students is a must – a paragraph means different things to different students, even when a definition is given. But as time goes on, and teachers of all grade levels do some sort of blogging in some or all their classes, the students will be able to increase their communication potential.

Several studies on the topic have been done, and I read them before completing this blog. I also know what we have done the past several years in trying this at my school, and I see the fifth through eighth grade language arts classes come into the lab, and the frustration of the teachers. Each year, we seem to get less and less out of the students – from cooperation to quality of work. And when they are comfortable with a teacher, there’s even less cooperation. The studies and information I looked at include: http://ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/6/41/, http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=LB5T4v52GdTTc3GpwGHxX8339vjvnGqL25j8XMgvmkyMnyjvL272!-635650599!-165273011?docId=5002623298, http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech217.shtml, and http://www.techteachers.com/blogs.htm.