A great example of blogging with students is Konrad Glogowski’s Blog of Proximal Development, which shares a variety of tips for blogging with students such as How to Grow a Blog and Towards Reflective BlogTalk.
Glogowski contends that blogs are essentially a sustained conversation between communities of thinkers and writers:
When we talk about blogging, most of us focus on writing. We tend to ignore the fact that a class blogging community provides teachers with a very valuable opportunity to use informal instructional conversations to engage our students as thinkers and writers. These conversations can help our students immerse themselves in the rich tapestries of voices that characterize blogging communities.
Blogs are perfect tools to encourage and assist students in cognitive engagement. Blogging is a process, a conversation. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, my students tend to see each blog entry as the equivalent of a well-composed paragraph response or even an essay. I admit, there is nothing wrong with producing well-written and well organized entries as long as the entry is not an end in itself, as long as the process of intellectual engagement does not end once the piece is posted. I want my students to understand that bloggers blog because they are on a journey, a quest, and that every entry is an opportunity to continue that journey.
Great Post, Dr. Dail! When looking at school created blogs, many of us have yet again missed the mark, creating post for assignments and nothing more. To truly expand the cognitive engagement we are going to have to expand our own motivation, and therefore desire to learn.
I think using blogging in the classroom is a very useful and informative approach to shaing knowledge, but we have to get our students that that point. The journeys we embark on must not end, but must continue if knowledge is to truly be shared. Also, great blogging links! I will use these as references no doubt!