What's a Blog for Anyway?
According to Maloy, O'Loughlin, Edwards, and Woolf in Transforming Learning with New Technologies, there are two different kinds of educational Websites to develop relationships with students: one is teacher-oriented, the other is student-oriented. The student oriented blog is a forum where student ideas and actvities are published.Unlike a school Website, a blog is more conversational. Student interests can be shared and highlighted. Updating a blog is usually much easier than updating a Website. Blogs are casual and inspire casual comments and communication. A blog can be a diary with someone else commenting on the material. There is no problem using the word 'I' when talking on a blog.
Blogs can be useful in presenting new areas for learning by encouraging students to research and write where the whole world can see the results rather than just turning in a paper to a teacher for a grade. Discussions of the subject and the artifacts on the blog encourage participation by members of a class who might not ordinarily respond in a regular classroom. The Maloy text referred to Twitter and Plurk as microblogs because they allow only short coments. According to the text, there are three types of school blogs: official school blogs that serve as information centers, single purpose blogs such as in subject areas, and conversational blogs for communication between students and teachers and students and students.
Maloy,et.al., present three ways to produce a blog: use blogging software, use a commercially available blog template, and utilize free open software packages such as Moodle.
The basic components of a blog are: headings, pages, archives, categories, Blogroll, and Meta, which lists credits. The most important thing to remember is that good blogs require planning.
