Blogging Applications for Teachers and Students

Blogging can be a useful tool for both teachers and students.  Here are some possible applications:

Teachers

• Classroom management applications such as calendar, class roster, syllabus, assignments, and attendance
• Collaborative applications with students such as maintaining folders for students' work, with instant teacher critiques and suggestions for revision
• Enable additional opportunities for mentoring individual students
• Communicating with other teachers, administrators, and parents regarding student performance and evaluation
• Use of blogs as a centralized library to pull together instructional materials relevant to the course
• Can give parents access to students work (and assignments) and encourage their involvement

Students

• Learn to collaborate with other students on projects
• Get instant feedback on submitted projects from their teachers
• Get feedback on their work from other students
• Get more involved in the educational process and more motivated to succeed
• Improve their reading and writing skills
• Can use blogs as a forum to hone their communication skills and develop their critical reasoning abilities

Example of a possible assignment:  Students would be separated into small groups.  One group would post information about the US system of government, its structure and functions, in outline form.  Each of the remaining groups would choose one of a few selected countries with a different model (the British parliamentary system, the French system, the Chinese system, for example) and post information about that country's system of government.  The blog discussion topic would be to compare and contrast the different systems via postings.