Blogging Activities
If you are new to the world of blogs, you may need some ideas to get you started. In the many years we have spent writing for educators interested in integrating technology, we have avoided offering descriptions of a limited number of specific projects. We were influenced in this approach by an argument offered by Harris. Her concern has been that providing educators detailed descriptions of one or two specific projects amounts to an invitation to duplicate these projects and the real goal should be to help educators understand strategies on a more general level so they will apply general strategies to the specific content areas appropriate to local circumstances. Originally focusing on email-based listservs, an area with some important similarities to blogs, Harris proposed teachers consider "activity structures". This approach recognized common situations that might occur in many classrooms and content areas and proposed that educators consider when such situations might occur in their own.
We will attempt to adapt the Harris concept of activity structures to classroom blogs and identify some general strategies we and others have recognized. In addition, we will provide links that will allow you to explore some specific examples. One advantage of resources that reside on the web is that most are available for examination. Others have made the effort to identify, organize, and provide links to some of these sites. We will identify some of these resources at the end of this section.
Classroom blog - A blog can serve as a general information site for a classroom and in this role function as an easy to edit web site. Some refer to such a site as a classroom portal in keeping with the multiple functions and multiple audiences such sites are intended to serve. While classroom sites may be maintained by the teacher, students may also assume partial or total responsibility for such sites. One strategy sometimes used when students are involved is to rotate responsibility among students. It has become common to refer to the student in charge of posting to the blog as the scribe.
Extended project or event blog - Many classes schedule a special trip or project consistent with the content area covered and a blog provides a great way for students to prepare for, comment on, and review the experience. Examples of extended projects might include the consideration of a novel, a multi-day trip to a regional wildlife learning site or a location such as Washington, DC, or a classroom campaign focused on recycling.
Content summary blog - This type of blog, generated by the instructor or students, offers a summary (sometimes with extension) of the core ideas and skills that a course covers. Such blogs may also outline specific tasks (perhaps homework) that students are expected to address.
Daily bits - This category of blog features frequent posts offering a narrow and specific type of information - school announcements, vocabulary word, grammar rule, historical event, foreign language phrase, famous person's birthday, web site recommendation, etc.
Extra curricular activity blog - A blog that follows the activities of a school athletic team, theater or musical group, or other extracurricular organization.
How are blogs different from web tools I am already familiar with? Why might blogs be better?
These are fair questions. Students were creating web pages before blogs were available. Listservs and discussion boards have been available to educators for even longer. In our own experience, we participated in what were called bulletin boards before we had access to post to an audience on the Internet.
Here are some differences that occur to us.
Blogs vs. Web Pages
In general, blogs require less skill to create and rely on the use of less sophisticated software. At the most basic level, creating a blog entry is very similar to generating an email message; write the header, write the post, and submit. Of course, most blog software allows the inclusion of links and multimedia content (images, video, audio) within a post and the modification of the look of the entire blog site through the selection of different "themes" and with some software different widgets. It is possible to operate a blog using only a standard web browser (Internet Explorer, FireFox, etc.). Low cost software to edit images and audio are helpful in the preparation of multimedia content.
The downside of this approach is the limited structural flexibility of a blog in comparison to a web page. A web page is typically created from scratch in whatever arrangement of text and multimedia elements appeals to the author. Free tools for creating web pages from scratch are available, but most authors rely on commercial software. Some time is also required to learn develop basic level skills with these tools and more time is required for the more advanced techniques.
Blogs vs. Listservs and Discussion Boards
All of these applications share content with multiple readers. A listserv functions by allowing members of an inclusive group to send an email message to a server which then distributes the email to all members of the group. Discussion boards (sometimes called forums) allow participants to exchange comments. Comments typically follow topics referred to as strands and a discussion board may have several strands active at any point in time. Discussion boards may restrict access to members or be open to all. Access to listservs and discussion boards typically relies on existing software (email client and web browser).
These applications can be differentiated based on the extent that the applications allow personalization. A blog can function as a personal web site to which others can contribute comments (if comments are allowed). Listservs and discussion boards are more community property in terms of control and appearance.
Blogs can also be differentiated from listservs and most discussion boards in that blogs tend to be open access sites that encourage wide viewing through functions such as rss feeds. This difference in access potentially has both positive and negative consequences. On the negative side, educators are sometimes concerned with the issue of who might view a student blog. On the positive side, there is something motivating about the quest to attract readers and the possibility that your posts on a given topic may represent the desired response to a search query.