Blogging is a significant tool for 21st century teachers, because it opens up an entire new portal between educators, businesses, community members, students, support groups, and more. Teachers can create their own ideas, publish them on websites, share them, receive feedback, fine tune them, and employ them in their classrooms. They can borrow ideas from other blogs, refreshing their own lessons or infusing assignments with creativity, diversity, differentiation, and multiply learning styles. Blogging places a new meaning to the saying “It takes a village to raise a child” as we now have global participation on the crafting of lessons, units, quizzes, projects, and assessments.
Students seem engaged by this asset, so shouldn’t teachers get on board, too? We should be journaling in this format; this is a great way to teach writing and reading skills if only we can discuss the technology for them. This could be less threatening, paperless, more enjoyable technique for submitting writing samples and innovative assignments.
We should probably see more learning progression as they create their personal learning environments, setting up their blogs, accessing Web 2.0 collections and websites to gain insightful knowledge in new user friendly technology. Anyone who is capable of using a social networking website will be able to implement a web 2.0 tool to broaden their horizons and worldview. In the words of Marshal McLuhan, ”The medium is the message,” meaning that the way in which a person receives a message can be more impactful then the message itself (Understanding Media, 1964).
Blogs are the wave of the future in terms of education and communication.
Photo from http://www.arte10.com/blogs/Artarte/blog.php?id=151 Retrieved November 6, 2009
"They can borrow ideas from other blogs, refreshing their own lessons or infusing assignments with creativity, diversity, differentiation, and multiply learning styles." Beautifully stated:)!
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