Within my professional learning community, my colleagues and I have been having a lively discussion about the purpose and value of blogs. So I was looking over the blog I created on Blogspot, the precursor to this website, which I inaugurated on November 18, 2012. In the little over two years since I started my first blog, I have published nearly 300 posts. To date, I have attracted over 24,889 page views. I’ve been told this is pretty impressive, so I thank all my Blogspot readers! I love to write about great teachers, and I hope that my posts and books will inspire respect for educators, and also reinforce a passion for the profession from current practitioners.
Even though my favorite thing to write about is remarkable teachers, it seems that the posts that garner the most response are the ones that offer tips and hints about how teachers can build upon their own practice. So this post is an offering in that vein.
As you can expect from teachers, most of the conversations I’ve had with my colleagues have revolved around how blogs can be used productively in the classroom. There are so many possibilities to use blogs as an effective instructional tool! Some of the purposes we discussed include providing opportunities for educators to personally reflect on teaching experiences, to provide tips and strategies to other teachers, to record lesson plans and other curricular materials, and to explore issues and topics important to the profession. You can use the platform to keep parents informed of your instructional program. You can create an online book club for your students, or post assignments, writing prompts, or online readings for students to react to. You could showcase your students’ writing, art, and projects. You could build a class newsletter and record your students’ activities, posting photographs and videos of them in action. Using blogs, students can express opinions about class readings or current events, complete class writing assignments, put together an online portfolio of their work, or showcase products of their project-based learning, all for a pre-determined audience: just the members of the class and their parents, groups of students in other schools, or even the world at large. This real-world application of the technology falls in line very nicely with Common Core State Standards—which is a genuine benefit.
I’ve included here a ten-minute YouTube video to help you further explore the practice of classroom blogging. If you are not yet using blogs in your instructional program, I hope that now you will feel confident enough to give it a try!
