Why Blog?

http://suewaters.com

Sue tells us – The question is ‘scaffold vs struggle’.  Can you be too helpful when introducing blogging to students?

 

Jan Smith‘s advice is:

 

 The big idea is to go slow to go fast.

If you don’t lay the groundwork by building a community of trust, risk, support with your kids they fail big.

Reading and commenting have to be the core, or else a blog is just a digital bulletin board.

 

Creating Global Connections

Connecting with other classes can have a huge impact on your class blog because:

1. Your students benefit from having an authentic and global audience
2. You gain from being supported by other educators — increasing your skills and developing new ideas that benefit your students

An authentic and global audience is important because:

• When students are writing or publishing for an audience other the teacher, it impacts how they view what they doing and the intrinsic motivation they have.
• Students love seeing their work on the Internet and adore getting comments from people. It motivates them to write as it gives them an audience that is real.  The blog opens up a whole new world of people who can offer encouragement and feedback.
•  Blogging provides an authentic educational experience, where what they write is not only seen and commented on by their teacher, but by their peers and the “public.” For most students, it’s a bit of extra motivation knowing their peers will see their work.
• There is an authentic audience – a global audience – one that is willing to connect, share, challenge, discuss and communicate with classes. This audience can provide further information, opinions, suggest resources, seek answers to questions and so on which pushes blogging further.
• Provides real world problems and solutions to share.

Sue Waters Summarized from The State of Educational blogging in 2012.