Blog uses and advantages

In my experience blogs have been mainly used as part of educational tasks set by teachers as part of my degree subjects. I have also had experience of blogs as educational resources that have helped me to find information on learning languages and other general information about a wide range of topics. As mentioned in the article ‘Project Work through Blogging’, blogs can about any subject and their writers can have differing levels of expertise on the subject that they are writing about. I usually use blogs to find links to other websites which the blogger has compiled on his/her blog therefore; I do not need to worry so much about this facet of blogs. In the journal article by Baker (2009) the advantages of using blogs to encourage students to write creatively in a foreign language are highlighted. As blogs constitute a real form of communication I can see how this would motivate students in an EFL classroom as the entries that are published in the blogs would be accessible to fellow students and the internet community in general. Similarly, Amir (2010) noted how the nature and low cost of blogs can be used to help students to write collaboratively. Using blogs as a tool to encourage teamwork is, therefore, another advantage of using blogs in the classroom. Yang (2009) highlights an additional benefit of using blogs. He describes how blogs can be used to enable students to reflect critically on their learning process. The nature of blogs enables comments and feedback to create discourse between students. This process has the advantage of creating a situation where students can respond to each other’s ideas and comments thereby creating a situation in which reflection can take place about the learning/teaching process. Reflecting upon learning is a valuable and worthy experience in my opinion. In conclusion, blogs have been shown to have numerous benefits in the learning process as they improve communication, motivate and allow reflection. All of these benefits are in addition to the fact that students are also developing their IT skills whilst they are interacting with the blogs. Therefore, blogs can been seen as highly beneficial to the learning process. References http://www.lte-project.com/images/stories/documents/guidelines2.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/1481/1/kemboja.pdf http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281101192X http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ836288