Why let students blog?  The list is infinite:  ownership of writing, connection to the world, motivation, authentic audience (not just teacher), multiple learning styles, prepare students for digital citizenship, gallery of class projects, students as teachers, parent connection,….If you would like a true list of reasons for students to blog, it wouldn’t take more that an afternoon of reading blogs to run across everything from the top 20 reasonsto winning a T-shirt  You can even hear about blogging straight from the mouth of students.  Why did my students start blogging?  I wanted them to be part of social technology outside of myspace.  I wanted them to actually see “outside of the box” outside of their town, their state, and their nation. I wanted them to take ownership in their education.  And I wanted my student from a town of less than 15,000 to see that they truly are part of this world and this world is open to them.  Any classroom can have a great journal with provoking higher order thinking questions, but that journal can’t interact with the students, it can’t ask questions, and it can’t expand students view and knowledge.

I do most of my personal learning and information gathering in the following ways:

• aggregating feeds of interest into my Google Reader
• receiving news alerts of interest on educational and other topics into Google Reader
• searching for articles of interest in Digg
• Facebook–I get lots of good info from my friends, including video which is right on the page
• blogging–this is by far my most professionally valuable activity as it compels me to do research, consider issues, and basically get it right
• Ning groups

For personal and classroom collaboration, I recommend:

• Ning–create your own customized classroom or school network. A one-stop shop for much of what you’ll want to do.
• An online docs sharing network such as Google docs (not preferred due to formatting issues) or, better yet, Box.net
• Twitter (if it’s fully functional)
• Google suite of tools, including Google Docs, Google Sites, etc.
• Email still works
• Ustream for live presentations
• Slideshare for slideshows
• Class blogs for reflection and information
• Class wikis for gathering and making sense of information

Thoughts?

Julie Lindsay addresses this topic in her e-Learning Journeys blog. An excerpt:

I tried to explain that my class does not end when the students work out the door. The collaboration, interaction and socialisation continues. My students interact with each other, they interact with me, their teacher, via online tools of various names and varieties which could all come under the broad term of ‘social networking’. They have their own online areas, including digital portfolios, as well as community areas. They post to blogs and respond to each other. They are out there using social bookmarking, folksonomy, class wikis, creating podcasts and vodcasts and putting them online, using social imaging (flickr) and anything else I can think of to encourage motivation and excitement in their ultimate quest for learning. I do not apologise for this. I do not essentially see anything wrong with this in 21st century learning. In fact this approach has changed my whole teaching style and changed the way I interact with the students. The development of PLEs (personal learning environments) and ubiquitous and mobile computing means I now start my classes with ‘…open your blogs, refer to the class wiki…etc’ rather than ‘..take out your books and copy from the board’.

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