After reading the article “Adventures in Blogosphere: from blog readers to blog writers” by Lara Ducate and Lara Lomicka, I recognise the potential of blogging as a tool to enhance reading and writing, two areas which continue to be a challenge for all teachers. Blogging is a computer assisted learning tool, and I feel that this makes it an attractive and appropriate medium for our students, who have a natural, almost built in ability to learn using the computer.
The research done by Ducate and Lomicka endorses the positive role of computer assisted tools, particularly blogging, in teaching and learning. As the title suggested children can be taken on an adventure in cyberspace; sharing their ideas and learning from their peers, in a social environment free of inhibitions and intimidations usually associated with the traditional classroom. In such an environment struggling readers and writers, as well as, shy and introverted students can express their feelings and interact with others, learning vicariously, while at the same time building their self confidence and self esteem. The scaffolding provided by the computer in terms of spell and grammar checks, frees the student to express herself/himself and to write spontaneously and regularly. This article also endorses the findings of Ferdig and Trammel (2004) who claims that blogging “enhances students’ interest and involvement in learning”, while “giving students a glimpse of a variety of viewpoints to help them expand their own”.
In my opinion, blogging can facilitate meaningful and interactive discussions in my classroom, and in the wider community, thereby providing opportunities for social and collaborative learning. Current controversial issues such as capital punishment and the advantages and disadvantages of giving S.E.A students laptops, can generate interesting discussions which can go along way towards developing students’ critical thinking skills.
Hi Arleen,
ReplyDeleteLike you I believe that blogging can be a very useful in developing students' reading and writing skills. Although blogging can be beneficial to primary school students, I feel blogging as an educational tool would be more suitable for use with secondary school students. Teenagers, for the most part, are the ones who emailing, texting, blogging and using social applications like facebook, my space and twitter constantly.
eSchoolNews (2008) reports the results of a survey that reveal that teens bloggers tend to write more frequently both online and offline. In other words, blogging is making them more prolific writers. Teens also reveal that writing for an audience, other than their teacher alone, motivates them to write well and more frequently.
A point to note however, is that 82% of the students surveyed believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further although they would prefer teachers to use computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class to teach writing (eSchoolNews, 2008. Students must therefore be taught critical thinking skills before asking them to apply them when blogging.