This is a basic guide I thought I’d put together to explain to teaching staff and learners that I work with what blogging is, why it’s a great tool to use and how it can help teachers teach and learners learn.

I’ve drawn upon some great resources I’ve come across (mainly blogs!), my favourites being Bionic Teaching and The Edublogger. I particularly like this posting on Bionic Teaching as it has a great presentation explaining the basics entitled ‘Bob on Blogs’.

I’ve also drawn upon my own experience of blogging and how that has helped me develop professionally through a ‘personal learning network’.

First of all then, what is blogging?

The best description of I’ve heard of a blog is an online (i.e. on the web) journal or diary. When a blog is used by a number of different people it becomes more than that - it becomes a collaborative space. More about that later.

A blogger is therefore someone who keeps a blog and the process of writing in their blog is called blogging!

Blogs about all sorts of things exist - they are as varied as the bloggers that create them. They range from individuals writing about a hobby or what they had for tea to multinational corporations using blogs as a form of public relations.

If you are reading this, then you are already aware of what a blog is. Please feel free to leave a comment below and you will be fully experiencing the interactivity of blogging! And hey, I’ll even post a reply back!

A further clever thing that blogging does is that it uses something called ‘trackback’. When I write a post that refers to someone elses blog - for example, I mentioned ‘Bionic Teaching’ above, they will be notified through ‘trackback’ that I’ve written a post about their blog. It links people together and creates a network of people who may be researching about and writing about the same things.

Why use blogging in Education?

A blog is relatively easy to set up. You can set a blog up and publish your first post to the masses in minutes. Google has it’s own blogging interface called Blogger. Some people use Typepad. Some people use Wordpress. Many people in education use Edublogs because it’s custom designed for teachers and students and has useful moderation and security features and unlike Blogger is free from advertising.

There are a number of ways blogging can be useful in teaching and learning - and it’s up to whatever suits your needs and those of your learners best:

• A blog that is purely a resource (like a web site) for you to keep all your electronic and web based resources together. You can access it anywhere and so can your students.
• A Teacher led blog. (I particularly like this example as Mr C awards the commenting tiger award for best comment by a student) The Teacher has a blog where they post questions, homework and resources to. Students are asked to comment on these - to promote discussion and collaboration in and outside of class. Don’t worry these comments (or replies) can be moderated by the teacher before appearing on the blog! This also keeps a record of discussion, a record for assessment and a body of knowledge in itself.
• Student led blogs. Students each have their own blog. They can write posts and keep them private if they wish, share it only with selected individuals or publish them to the masses. The student could keep a reflective learning journal or use it for more subject focused tasks such as creating a fictional blog for a character in a novel in English or History, record of Scientific or Mathematical investigations or in another language in MFL. The teacher can respond to the posts by the student and give direct feedback and/or you can allow students to give peer feedback (again moderated). You could even get students to post their essays directly to the blog and by moderating you are assessing their work.

Of course, a combination of the above is possible too.

To get started, I’d suggest registering with Edublogs for a blog here and then choosing a nice layout called a template. It;s then fairly straightforward to write your own post but if you come unstuck, have a look at this on the Edublogger blog.