17A blog is a wonderful aid for learning. The teacher can use the blog as a course home page: you can publish the learning materials, tasks and notifications and have conversations about them on the blog. The learners on the other hand, can start their own blogs in which they can carry out the tasks and monitor their learning. The blogs can be either private or public.
It Only Takes a Minute
There are plenty of free blogging services available and starting a blog, as well as using it, is extremely simple. The services can be compared based on their features, usability and permanence. Google’s Blogger is fairly familiar and an easy choice because it allows you to select your preferred language, including Finnish. The multilingual WordPress offers a ready-made blog as well as open-source blog software for downloading. Edublogs offers diaries specifically meant for teaching, but the only language option is English. If the language you use in the course is, for example, Swedish or Finnish, I absolutely recommend selecting a platform which comes in that language.
Creating a blog is easy by following a few guided steps. The blog services offer many simplepresentations and videos which will give you extra information. The real work starts when you get to the content production.
Blog to Build Your Home Base, to Share Material, for Extra Flavour
If you make the blog into a home base for your course, the way to begin is to plan the general plot for it, the number of blog posts and content. The planning progresses the same way it normally does for an online course. Face-to-face teaching can also be supplemented with online material.
The teacher can also write the learning material for the course on the blog and publish it bit by bit during the course. In an expert blog, the course’s themes are dealt with more freely and it functions as additional reading material. At its best, the teacher’s blog will become a widely read bestseller like Steven Wheeler’s Learning with ‘e’s.
The teaching can also be spiced up with a video or a picture blog, and the treatment doesn’t have to be too serious either. I have often used my Kielikuvia mobile blog, which takes a playful look at publicly made language mistakes.
The usage of blogs is of course most effective when the students themselves write it either alone or in groups. A blog combines the benefits of writing and publishing. Blogging becomes better motivated if private blogs are opened to the entire group and they receive comments. In the best scenario, the learning diary will grow into an expert blog in time.
One part of blogging is following other blogs – or the blogosphere. Good tips on the useful blogs to follow can be found on blog lists and blogs recommended by experts. It really pays to get to know, for instance, well-known edubloggers.