Blogging is a great, informal way to express your thoughts and ideas in an open forum. I believe that blogging can be very impactful in a classroom setting.
Blogging is something that I have experimented with the last couple of years as a form of journaling in my 7th and 8th-grade classes. Students in my classroom are on STEM rotations of two-week periods and they work in pairs. They do projects like build a and design solar cars, robots, bridges and other STEM-related activities. No two students are doing the same project at one time. My classroom is what I like to call "organized chaos." Students are challenged to problem solve and work as a team to create a specific project. Blogging goes so well with this curriculum because my classroom is unconventional by nature. Although blogging has become more mainstream, a lot of people still don't see it as a way that it could be used in the classroom. "Teachers facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity."(ISTE, 2008) It is up to teachers to keep moving forward and inspire our students to think outside the box.
Students are able to either blog through regular blogging methods or develop a video blog or "vlog" to document their work. I have a good mix of students picking both types of blogging. One of the most important things about blogging is teaching and practicing digital citizenship. Digital citizenship is a topic that we cover extensively at the beginning of each school year, and several times throughout. One of the ISTE Standards for Teachers states that "Teachers promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility. (ISTE, 2008)
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from: http://www.iste.org/standards/standards/standards-for-teachers Accessed on 5/15/2018
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
