Are blogs either a great way of teaching or are they a terrible way of teaching? When students, such as myself, are asked to use blogs as a way to gather information, find ideas, or just to use blogs as an assignment, we tend to overlook the actual purpose for using blogs. It is quite common to find a student that is strongly against using a blog for many reasons but actually blogs are actually a great and unique way of teaching and it might surprise you as to why they are a great teaching tool. Blogs allow many people, students, teachers, and other peers collaborate on a single and/or ideas all at one time. This allows for great and in-depth arguments that encourage individual critical thinking and help strengthen one's ability to support their own argument with legit information. Blogs also helps inspire creativity, which has been lacking in many classes and teachings, and encourages users to become more interactive with each other and, rather brilliantly, causes team work because of all of these ideas being thrown around and then elaborated to create interesting beliefs, thoughts, arguments, and originality in developing topics.
Loads of quite interesting information can be found at My English Pages (and click on the, 11 advantages of using a blog for teaching, slide show) as to why blogs should be used for teaching. This blog makes eleven claims, obviously, that are actually over looked when teaching using a blog(s). My English Pages makes a claim that states that "using a blog captures changes in thinking" and makes another claim that says "using a blog invites people to collaborate". I guess it was interesting to me because I never gave blogs that much of a thought when it came to group work until a read this quote and realized, "wow I have been doing this the whole time".
Another reason as to why blogs should be used more often is because of the student's time. If you at what Yahoo Voice has said about this advantage to using blogs, it makes sense. When yahoo voice talks about timing and place, they make the case that when blogs are used for students, students tend to be much more open to the idea because "this advantage allows students who are busy with work, sports, and other commitments to read and understand content that they respond to outside of the physical classroom". Being that I am a student, I do find that simply finding time for work and school can be absolutely dreadful but blogs helped open some of my between class time to do other work for school.
What else makes blogs a great and interesting tool to use for teaching?
How can blogging be improved to help make learning better?
Is there a better way to teach other than blogging or teaching in a classroom?
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