Blogs are a social networking tool that can be used to engage a host of different audiences on a diverse range of interests.

In blogs specific to education, teachers and students can publish material on all kinds of areas, from personal to professional. For example, perhaps a student might blog about their first term at a new school or projects they’ve worked on and enjoyed. Whereas a teacher might blog about useful tips for studying or any classroom experiences.

The Whiteboard Blog is a recommended blog site for science and technology teachers.

Edublogs is a WordPress site designed for teachers and students to manage blogs, eportfolios and websites. What’s great about this platform is that it has been customised with features specifically for education, so managing student creators, comments, privacy, groups, activity reports and progress. So this digital space is tailor-made for the learning environment.

Out of the academic sphere, blogs can focus on topics like cooking tips to the latest tech gadgets. In fact, you’ll find that most businesses will have some kind of blog to keep their loyal customers up to date with the latest news or products.

If you find a favourite blog, you can ‘follow’ it – which means you’ve subscribed to the site and will know when any new developments or announcements are posted. This is what makes blogs so ‘on the pulse’ – the material is current and topical. Which lends itself to discussion.

The Moz blog covers all things SEO and online marketing-wise. Always acutely current and full of great advice for those in this field.

Bloggers can experiment with multimedia - text, video, photos, links to other recommended sites and sources. This taps into multimodal communication techniques, which means the blogger is practising their skills in all these modes.

This ‘practice by doing’ feeds into the concept of situated cognition whereby the blogger is immersed in social and cultural contexts to develop their learning. Blogging means they provide a curated website of their own design and making for others to engage and comment on. Depending on privacy settings, this can be readers outside of their personal sphere at school or college and be open to everyone.

This is quite a courageous step, to broadcast your words, images, videos to others – peers and outsiders – for feedback and commentary. It means you’re willing to accept what comes back both good and bad. But this also cultivates collaboration with all kinds of diverse orientations which in turn enables a richer learning experience for the blogger and those engaging with the site. Everyone’s comments are open and transparent for all to see and therefore can spark more and more conversation.

Obviously, there is a down-side to this. If your blog is public, you can get trolls leaving tasteless or unstructured comments. But what I like about blogging is:

1. it is a daring exercise of putting yourself out there
2. it allows us to learn about the online world

Students need to know how to use this digital space appropriately and when to ‘turn it off’. Part of being online is understanding your audience is far and wide, with many different opinions and experiences.

Common Sense Education sums this up perfectly:

‘It's critical for students to learn to write clearly, communicate effectively, and express themselves. In today's classrooms, it's especially important that students practice these skills in authentic digital contexts that help them become good digital citizens who can contribute ethically, critically, and responsibly in online communities.’

References:

• https://elearningindustry.com/how-to-use-blogs-in-the-classroom
• https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2016/08/17/blog-rankings-2/
• https://edublogs.org/
• https://www.commonsense.org/education/top-picks/writing-journaling-and-blogging-websites-for-students
• https://www.learning-theories.com/situated-cognition-brown-collins-duguid.html
• https://www.commonsense.org/