The Benefits of Student Blogging

I’m taking a web 2.0 course and have been learning about student blogging.  While we currently use Moodle with our students and use “Forum” discussions to get them talking online with each other about a given topic, I’ve always felt this to be very limiting.  Specifically, Moodle limits them to discussions with just their own classmates.

The blogs I’ve been examining gives students the chance to communicate their thoughts and ideas with a larger audience than just their class.  This hopefully broadens their perspective on things and enables them to share ideas with people/cultures very different from their own.

I reviewed at  student blog , a 5th grade student in Anne Davis’ writing class: Here’s the teacher’s site :

What impressed me about this  student blog is the fact that Lucy just started blogging this year; did not like it at first; but grew to like it more as the year progressed.  She looked forward to comments on her blog and stated it had a positive effect on her writing skills.

We need to get our students blogging as part of the Digital Citizenship unit as it is quickly becoming the “communication tool” of the 21st Century.  Blogging makes students better writers and synthesizers of information on the web. When we expose our students to these tools in our classrooms, we help them build the skills to use technology as lifelong learners.

So how do we teach blogging?

Option 1: There is no other way to learn it than by doing it.  Before we begin we need to to the following:

1. establish a policy for setting up blogging accounts.  Does our current AUP policy cover accounts for students in order to use the various web 2.0 tools.
1. wordpress or edublog; – need account to respond to teacher blog
2. eduglogster (already have teacher class accounts);
3. voicethread (fake dasd,org account works for student responses);
4. google docs – don’t need to respond but do need to create
2. establish a policy for setting privacy parameters for student blogging:
1. elementary- class student forum discussions on teacher moodle
2. middle school – above +teacher edublog – limit discussion to class members – all of my 8th grade students can converse with each other?  possibly invite by teacher to blog with outside expert.
1. Use teacher DigitalCitizenship blog as way to get students blogging.  Build lessons for Cyberbulling; Social Bookmarking; etc.
3. high school – extend audience beyond the teacher blog – students blog  with “outside world” on topics in Social Studies class or Tech class.  Maybe students even create their own blog?
3.  establish guidelines for moderation of comments on blog:
1. will teacher read all posts before publishing? (moderating  approach) or
2. will teacher allow students to post and read them regularly to see what students are writing  (monitor approach).
1. I would suggest monitor approach for class blogs and moderating approach if outsiders on the web are allowed to participate.

Option 2- teach student blogging by having them participate in a student blogging challenge sponsored by Edublog.   The goals of the challenge are:

• Student Blogging Challenge
• March and September each year
• 10 weeks of challenges
• Improve student commenting and blogging skills
• Interact with classrooms all over the globe

This might be a good way for our computer classes to get involved in blogging next year.