Blogs are completely new to me, and I haven't had much experience with them or truly know the purpose of blogging. In my researching to learn more about Blogs I come to find that a blog is simply a web page that is written in an informal or conversational manner. The purpose of a blog is to provide information on a person's perspective on a specific topic or to answer questions on a specific subject. I also found that there can be pros and cons to blogging as well.
Pros to blogging is that it can be rather easy to do. The blog can give others a reason to visit your website and help create a sense of community. The blog itself can be a sense of inspiration to yourself or others that read the blog. They can be a way to outreach others needing more information or that have the same questions that you do as the writer of the blog. There are lots of things that are great about writing blogs and reading them but there are also some things that can be cons.
Cons to blogging is that it can be time consuming as it takes time to regularly update them to create a good blog. The information you put in the blog can create problems if you happen to be to open or to honest with your feelings or reveal too much information about a specific subject or idea. Then of course you can always have technical issues when blogging which can be a lot of trouble trying to fix in order to keep your blog flowing and updated at a good scheduling pace.
Affordances
The educational affordances of blogs is giving opportunities for students to be self-directed learners in a social manner. Blogs can help students develop cognitive, social, and self-directed learning skills. Higher education is expecting students to be able to manage their own learning by requiring them to learn a range of different transferable cognitive and metacognitive skills which will enable them to learn more successfully in the future. Blogs are a convenient way for students to produce and share reflective learning logs and offer an audience for student writing within a safe zone of a community. This also leads to collaborative learning. This educational affordance is where students can read, write, and comment on others writing. This reflection is a key aspect of self-directed learning. Students can use these blogs to plan their learning, generate learning goals, estimate task difficulty, monitor progress, select different creative ideas, seek help, and evaluate both their own performance as well as the performance of their peers.
Support Learning
In thinking about how I can use a blog to support the learning in my current position was kind of tricky for me. I work in a blended preschool classroom where I work with very young children. I was just really kind of lost with how I could use a blog to support their learning. Then I started thinking that I was simply making thinking too hard about this and in the complete wrong direction. I was able to come up with two different ways that I could use a blog to help my students learn in my classroom.
First, I feel like a blog would be a great tool to use with my co-workers within my school district and surrounding school districts. I could use this blog to reach those that I may actually never meet in person, and we could share our experiences and ideas on this website in order to help us grow our mindset and therefore support our students learning. I think that this could actually be an amazing tool to use to share my ideas that I use in my teaching and to learn new ideas from other amazing educators. What a better way than to give other teachers a tool to use that they can do right from their very own home and gain new information that they can immediately put to use and go even further and share their amazing ideas with the community of my blog.
Second, I would love to use this blog to build a community of parents that we can then share our concerns with one another in order to make the educational system better together. I think that parents sometimes feel like we as educators don't want to hear their suggestions or opinions and as far as I am concerned that is far from the truth. So, why not use this platform to give them a place to share their ideas and their thoughts on how to make education better and let them be a part of their child's education. I invite my parents in my classroom to do just this so I would love to use a blog in order to grow that community and share that with everyone in my school neighborhood.
The more and more I dive into learning about Blogs the more I see that the pros far outweigh any cons there are on blogging. I think that I am already hooked on this new trend and ready to set forth on my blogging journey and just hope that the information I share and gather, and my community puts together helps others out there and grows a stronger education mindset for all.
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