The use of a blog in primary education can incorporate many positive aspects of reflective learning. It is a tool that is relevant to the manner in which students communicate and collaborate in today's society. It enables them to share ideas in a reflective manner with a larger audience particularly family members or friends while it provides an opportunity for others to respond and reciprocate through providing feedback (Cassidy, 2008).
This is an important component to the overall learning process as it strengthens reflection, writing skills, the ability to communicate effectively and collaboration. Furthermore, it enhances computer skills through the various creative outlets that are available such as the use of images, avatars and multimedia (Cassidy, 2008). Through utilising effective scaffolding blogs can be a positive and valuable tool to be utilised in many subject areas particularly as a reflective tool to document a learning journey as I have done in my own blog.
Strengths
- Ability to share ideas and personal thoughts
- Connections to a world outside the realm of the regular classroom
- Increases communication and collaborative learning through being able to post comments and respond to ideas presented
- Students can engage in self-guided learning where they can share multimedia such as You Tubes, presentations and photo stories
- It can be personalised and content is controlled by the individual
- It is an engaging tool that provides flexibility to the overall learning process
- Incorporative of various learning styles
- Promotes inquiry and investigation to establish its uses.
- Incorporates multiple levels of thinking from encourgaing reflective processes (Churches, 2009)
- It it is very much an idividualistic process although it does allow others to post comments and therefore it would be suitable for some tasks than others
- Careful scrutiny of safe and ethical use would need to be regularly communicated to students
- It requires monitoring of content
- It can be utilised in literacy tasks such as writing activities
- Students can create a learning journey for various subjects
- It can be a reflective tool
- Teachers can provide feedback, follow and monitor aspects of the learning journey
- Posts can be an assessable component of the learning journey
- Students may be able to follow blogs and copy others unique contributions rather than putting in personal effort
- A lot of time can be wasted on the aesthetic aspects of the tool as opposed to the learning journey itself
- If tasks are not scaffolded correctly it could minimise the potential of its uses.
Cassidy, K. (2008, Mar/Apr). "To blog or not to". Connect Magazine, 21(4), 1-3. Retrieved from
- Frangenheim, E. (2010). Reflections on classroom thinking strategies (9th ed). Loganholme, QLD: Roden Educational Publishing.
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