WHAT'S A BLOG?

The use of the blog in the classroom and its educational advantages

Blogs offers a  lot of possibilities of usage in educational processes. They encourage students to write, exchange their ideas, work as a team, design, visualize what they produce instantly and many other things. The creation of Blogs by students offers teachers the possibility of requiring them to carry out synthesis processes, since they must be punctual and precise, in the subjects they deal with when they write on the Internet, 

Teachers can use Blogs to approach students in new ways, without limiting their interaction exclusively to the classroom. For example, publishing materials immediately and allowing access to information or resources needed to carry out projects and classroom activities. That way, everybody optimizes time. Blogs also offer students the possibility of improving academic contents, enriching them with multimedia elements such as: videos, sounds, images, animations or other Webs 2.0.

The ease which they create and feed the Blog with, makes students' projects very striking because thanks to the predesigned templates, they do not have to concentrate on the technical implementation but on the contents and materials to be published. This help allows any teacher or student, regardless of the academic area, to create resources and contents of educational topics without having to install applications or have programming knowledge.

Collaborative work has been positioned as a good educational strategy. However, this methodology has the disadvantage of gathering all the members of the group in the same space. Working with Blogs, this difficulty is overcome because they offer a virtual space, independent of the physical site in which they are. Blogs generated between teachers and students enable the teacher, act as a facilitator of learning.

Students can include in their Blogs the link of their teachers' Blogs and thus be updated permanently with the latest entries published by them. The same can be done by the teachers with the link of their students' Blogs, so that as soon as someone publishes an entry, teachers can access it from their Blogs. The above mentioned provides the teachers, the control and revision of works assigned to the students that involve their publication in Blogs.

For a teacher or an Educational Institution, Blogs can become the tool that allows to communicate with the entire educational community, for free. For example, keep parents and / or attendants informed about news from students or the institution. Another usage is the digital students' newspaper that can be published in a Blog, saving printing costs and distribution.

Blogs also offer teachers facilities to create, visualize, update and share with other colleagues their own bank of class projects and activities.

A recommendation to be taken into account by teachers regarding the educational usage of Blogs is the clear formulation of the Learning Objectives that they intend to achieve with activities that involve their usage. They must also plan  the activities to be carried out in detail.