Blogs and Instructional Strategies

Blogs can be great tools that teachers can use to help engage students in the material. I think that blogs would work best in subjects and units that require or could require a great deal of reflection. For example, I feel that using a blog in an English class would feel very natural. Students could be asked to reflect on a piece of writing or an idea. Blogs could also be very useful when we use instructional strategies that put students more in charge of their own learning. For example, in cooperative learning activities, blogs could be used to express the progress of group work and debate the issues among group members. Similarly, in a inquiry/constructivist approach students could use blogs to document their findings as they work through a problem.

On the other hand, blogs might be more difficult to use in direct instruction or recall activities. As mentioned before, blogs would be very difficult to use for learning multiplication tables. Sure, students could post a blog entry with responses to recall questions. But the feeling of the blog would be lost. How could someone following the blog comment on a post that reads something like “10 x 2 =20; 10 x 3 = 30”? Blogs in a sense require reflection and something for a follower to comment on and add to. This is not to say that you could never use a blog in a math class. For example, one way to use a blog in a math class would be to have students describe how they solved a difficult equation step by step. Other users could then comment on the way the learner tackled the problem or perhaps, if necessary, point out flaws or mistakes.

I really like the idea of using a blog in my social studies classes. I love to have students write about a historical event from the perspective of someone living during that time. For example, one year, I had students write diary entries and letters from the aspect of a slave on the run, from the aspect of the fugitive slave catcher, and finally, from the aspect of the slave owner. It was not my way to justify slavery, but to have students begin to understand how/why slavery was able to continue for as long as it had in the South. I think posting these kind of assignments could be excellent material for a blog. It would be engaging students in the history material, yet asking them to reflect on it in a way that will help deepen their understanding of the ear, time period, or events.