Blogs and Wikis in Education

1. Blogs today seem to be mostly used to enhance communication between teachers and their students and their student’s parents. Having this open communication with students and their parents allows teachers to be more affective in their teaching as well as creating more accessibility for students to get in touch with their teacher. Another common way that blogs are being used in education is student to student communication. Some blog sites are setup as a safe place that students can talk with other students, whether it is local or abroad, and share information. This is a great way for students to get feedback from their peers as well as sharing information or research on related topics with each other. A third form of use for blogs in education was teacher to teacher communication. Teaching is a profession where it is crucial for colleagues to work together and share information, and blogs are a great way for teacher to get in touch with each other and share their ideas.

2. I would use either a RSS reader or an Aggregator in my classroom to keep up with my student’s blogs. If my students were using any form of blog posts, I would setup a reader so I could easily be updated when my students post something new. Keeping up with what my students are posting is something that would be very important for me in order to make sure what is being posted is appropriate.

3. Two positive aspects of using a blog or wiki site in your classroom could be the increase in communication between me and my students, and creating communication networks between my students and other students. Creating these forms of communication will allow for students to gain a sense of independence with their thoughts and ideas as well as being able to personally, and privately, communicate with me. However, having a blog post could cause some issues, especially with privacy. It would be important to make sure that whatever blog or wiki site that you are using is something that allows your students to remain anonymous at all times to anyone outside of the classroom network. Another thing to be aware of would be what students are posting. As the teacher you would need to make sure the content of what your students are publishing is appropriate, and relevant to what they are supposed to be posting about.