Written by: Jessa Laure Anne Palo
The classroom life is becoming more technology-focused. Slowly, technology is becoming a platform used in the academe for various school activities. Instead of technology distracting the students, it is used as a tool for encouraging them to participate.
According to Ellison & Wu’s (2008) study, students put more effort on inserting their own style when writing for a different audience aside from their teacher. As one of the participants said, “I like the ease of the form of a blog entry, I feel as if I can talk in my own voice, more than I can with a written paper assignment.”
Through blogging, students cannot only hone their writing skills, but they can also discover their own voice. These are some reasons why your students should have a blog:
- The students will be able to express their opinions freely. Through blogs, students will feel that they have a voice. They can write about what they think about a certain topic. At the same time, the students will feel that their opinions matter.
- The students will be able to think out of the box and broaden their perspective. They can connect with their readers and build empathy. Blogging can open your students’ mind to the world, at the same time, understand other people’s perspective as well.
- The students will be able to experiment different multimedia. Blogging is not just about writing, but also about the kind of media to use for each post. Students can try and explore multimedia platforms, from images to videos, which they can use for their posts.
- The students will be able to establish their digital presence. Through blogging, they establish their digital presence to help them be more credible in the future.
- The students will be able to create an open archive of learning. By maintaining a blog, the students can evaluate themselves and see their progress as they write more. After several posts, the students can go back and see how their thought processes developed as well as their writing style.
- The students will be able to get peer feedback as well as feedback from other people. Through blogging, you don’t have to critic their ideas that much because their readers will be the one to do it for you. The students will learn how to respond and form a sensible conversation with their readers. This is also the fun part of blogging as the more organic readers your students reach, the more they would be motivated to write better on their next post.
Blogging takes your class to the next level. Through blogging, you won’t just see the way your students think, but you can also hone their writing potentials and let them explore their passion.
Depending on which platform you’ll set up your students’ blog, you may still want to ensure that your students can express themselves properly on their blogs. With this, you can turn to Office 365 to simply look at your students’ entries before they post a write up. You can easily access Office 365 anytime and anywhere. That way, you can easily help your students before blogging. Just be sure to fix only the spelling and grammatical errors and not to question their ideas before they could post them.
Did these reasons make up your mind in setting up a class blog? If yes, share this post to your colleagues!
References:
http://matias.wiki.westga.edu/file/view/Blogging_article.pdf
https://ekuhns.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/5-reasons-your-students-should-blog-by-george-couros/
https://pernillesripp.com/2011/10/15/why-students-should-blog-my-top-10/
