A Teacher’s view of the benefits of blogging

There’s an excellent post over at Box of Tricks that doesn’t just go gooey-eyed at Web2.0 and openness but puts forward some sound educational benefits for blogging:

1. Showcasing your pupils’ work – Th mere fact their work is going to be published, possibly to a worldwide audience, is a powerful motivating factor. It also allows your students to feel ownership of their work and show it off proudly to friends and family.
2. Assessment for learning – The commenting functionality in blogs allows students to feedback on each other’s work and fosters self evaluation. Often this feedback students receive from their peers has a powerful influence on them and serves to reinforce that given by the teacher.
3. Engaging and motivating students – Web 2.0 offers a vast range of exciting and interactive learning possibilities that are designed to be shared on the internet. Blogs can take advantage of this as the outcome of these Web 2.0 creative tasks can generally be easily embedded into posts.
4. Showcasing students’ videos – Our students live in a world where videos are created and shared by ordinary people. They do it all the time with their digital cameras and mobile phones. We can channel some of this enthusiasm and creativity by asking our students to film their own videos, which we can then showcase in our blog.
5. Promoting target language use – By recording oral classroom activities such as dialogues or role-plays: if students know they are going to be recorded and the recording put on the subject blog, they then try harder and are more motivated to speak in the target language. This also gives parents and relatives an opportunity to see what their children get up to in class, thus helping bridge the home-school divide.
6. Sharing teacher resources – Why not share that PowerPoint or that .pdf document with your students or other teachers by making them accessible in your blog?
7. Sharing students’ resources – If one or more of your students create their own resources, such as vocabulary lists, study guides, grammar explanations, etc, you can also share these with the other students via the blog.
8. Hosting listening materials (including podcasts) – A blog is the perfect platform to deliver listening resources and podcasts, because the resources are hosted online and are therefore constantly and repeatedly available. You post it once but it can be listened to or downloaded an infinite number of times. If you are intrigued by or interested in creating your own podcast, then you ought to watch this video.
9. Linking to external resources – A blog can be a one-stop-shop for all your students’ language learning needs by linking to those resources which you have previously deemed suitable.
10. Media rich content – As hinted above, students lead a media-rich life – they share videos daily – A blog helps tap into this media-rich online lifestyle by directing them to those videos which you have sourced and you have decided are educationally sound, therefore promoting learning.
11. Promoting independent study – By linking to external resources such as videos or interesting websites or online newspaper articles, you are helping to develop your students’ intellectual curiosity, which in turn fosters learning autonomy.