Blogging as a tool

Is blogging a good tool for guiding teachers and students in how to use Moodle? Or are wikis more recommendable? In my job I help teachers and students using Moodle every day. They often ask the same questions. It would be helpful for me, and them, to have a pool of answers, easily accesible on the web. This is called an edublog.

But why use edublogs? Davies and Merchant (2009) claims there a several reasons for using blogging in education. Most blogging software is quick and easy to use and is one of the most well-established and well-known Web 2.0 applications. You can also use the term social software on these applications. they are suitable to support cooperation and communication on the Internet (Bjarnø, Giæver, Johannesen & Øgrim, 2009). They also give you the possibility to post comments to the subject matter or you can cooperate with fellow students and teacher to produce text (ibid.). You have the possibility to label posts so that readers can explore themes and topics (Davies and Merchant, 2009).

Edublogs.org list some of the different features of edublogs:

• Safe and Reliable – Blogs can be completely private or open to the public. Since we only host education related content, Edublogs are allowed by most school filters where other blogging platforms are not.
• Student Friendly – It is as simple to add to and update a blog as it is to send an email. Teachers can easily create and manage as many student blogs as needed.
• Rich With Features – A few of the most popular features include discussion tools, video embedding, Facebook and Twitter integration, and calendars.
• Customizable – With over 100 different themes which allow for control of colors, images, and layout.
• Research-Based – Engage students in their learning and enhance instruction through collaboration, student portfolios, and endless classroom uses (Edublogs.org, 2012).

For further reading about the features of edublogs they list 10 ways to use your edublog.



A further look at edublogs web pages led me to some interesting edublogs. A nice way to sum up learning or tags is the use of word clouds (above picture). Huzzah! shows an excellent example on how you can learn from other blogs and share links in the art project Eye candy. Here's another blog - Mr Borges and the Blog Squad. He's a teacher at an elementary school in Toronto and the Blog Squad is his students. He's made an interesting choice when it comes to layout. The pages in his blog are in the middle and not at the top as I expected it to be, because mots web pages are organised in that way. The different topics in the blog are placed vertical. As long as the topic headline is easy to understand I think this makes the blog distinct from other web pages. In Norwegian I like Lektor Michelsens (skole)blogg. He has linked to delogbruk.no, where teachers can "share, increase and use their digital skills"(delogbruk.no, collected 1 June 2012). Monivae College has developed different kind of science blogs I at the first glance found interesting: Sensational Science is easy to read and have a good layout. The blog also have links to other edublogs with the same topic. I'm a bit concerned about the religious angle, though. They are linked from edublogs.org.

Reference list
Bjarnø, V., Giæver, T.H.,Johannesen, M., & Øgrim, L. (2009). Didiktikk : digital kompetanse i praktisk undervisning. (2nd ed.). Bergen : Fagbokforl.
Davies, J. and Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for Schools : Learning and Social Participation. New York : Peter Lang.
Delogbruk.no. (2012) delogbruk.no. Samarbeid - Utdanning - fremtid, collected June 1st 2012 from http://delogbruk.no.
Edublog.com (2012). A quick overview of Edublogs, collected May 31th 2012 from http://edublogs.org/why-edublogs/#overview