How blogs can be beneficial to education

1. Create a paragraph on your experience setting up or using the blogging tool.

My first experience with a Blog came around 2000, when I had a LiveJournal account. It was easy to set up and I had a pretty good run with using it (I stopped using it around 2004 and have since forgotten the password). It seemed more like a diary or a journal in online format than anything else. At the time, in 2000, it was a novel feature to have an online blog and it was not necessarily popular. When I signed on there were only a few thousand users and the blogging device was around for at least a year. It was one of the first personal journal sites (well before MySpace and well before Facebook) that allowed users to publically or privately post their blogs, either to friends or just to themselves. Comments were later added to the LiveJournal to allow users or friends to publically post comments after a blog had been published. It was one of the early Facebooks of the day. The design was very clean and not cluttery (this was a time when dial up modems still ruled the day, with speeds that typically averaged 56kbps and even for DSL and cable speeds averaged around 256 kbps) and I always embraced such minimalist designs. (previously posted in the discussion boards)

2. Write and discuss the pros and cons of blogging as a collaborative tool.

Pros: Relatively quickly to set up and learn. Written information that can be quickly referenced. Interactive capabilities that allow students to reach the teacher or other students that doesn't require them to adjust their schedule.

Cons: Limited to those with internet capability (there are some students today that still do not have internet access). Since it is a public extension of the school, students and teachers must be extra careful to review what they post.

3. Explain how you might apply the blogging tool to your classroom or future classroom.

Some examples of how I could potentially use blogs in an educational setting would be setting up a problem that the class can solve to earn points that can be later used to turn individual quizzes into group quizzes. A student who has solved the problem before cannot solve another problem. Homework solutions can also be posted to the blog..which would force users to check the blog more often. Links to videos that could not be shown in class due to time constraints can be shown to students at their own leisure. (previously posted in the discussion boards).