February 2004 — Features
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Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere'
Spend time visiting other classroom blogs. Different instructors have used blogs with different objectives in mind. Find classroom blogs that are related to your teaching level and topic to see how they have set up blogs in the classroom. A great place to find classroom blogs is through SchoolBlogs (www.schoolblogs.com). Also, since Google now owns Blogger.com, a quick search on Google for "blog" and your topic area should provide some interesting results. We encourage you to contact the classroom instructor to find out what challenges and successes they experienced with your content area.
Model blogging for your students. In teaching and learning, we have specific outcomes and uses for blogging. Spend several sessions introducing the concept of blogging, how it is done, why it is done, showing good and bad blogs, etc. Then, provide a set of strict rules for blogging such as frequency, length of posts, number of hyperlinks and staying on topic. This set of rules can be created together with students; however, the students should be made explicitly aware of what is not appropriate on the blog. And remember that because the blog is a Web-based, informal communication, students may be apt to use inappropriate language on their blogs. They might also fail to use references and citations when quoting others' work.
Make the blogs more public. We have already addressed the benefits of the worldwide audience in blogging. Take an active role in publicizing student blogs by sharing links with the outside world, as well as trying to get experts or nonclass people to visit the student blogs and comment on them. This interaction with experts not only increases that which is learned through the exercise, but signals that there are real people reading the published content. This can lead to the student spending more time in preparing blog posts and thinking more critically because of this wide dissemination.
Explain the "reach" of blogs to students. Clearly communicate that the messages posted on a blog are publicly accessible. Therefore, an employer, friend or parent can easily access the blog. As such, students should remember that once something is posted on the Internet, communication is irreversible, even if later edited or removed.
