Blogging

Blog as a Teaching Tool

The most accessible and most widely used Web 2.0 services are network diaries (blogs) – small websites whose authors (bloggers) can manage access to the information posted on the blog: making it available to all users or only to a specific audience. Can be made accessible to. “Blog” comes from the English blogging (blogging) – the gateway to the “World Wide Web”, in which people keep their archives of records (Labudko, 2013). “The term ‘weblog’ was not coined until 1997. The coining of the term is credited to Jörn Barger of the influential early blog Robot Wisdom. The term was coined to denote the process of ‘web logging’ while browsing The first known example of a blog on a traditional news site was in 1998, when Jonathan Dube blogged on Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer. ‘Weblog’ was shortened to ‘blog’ in 1999. Just five years later, Merriam-Webster declared the term its word of the year” (“A Brief History of Blogging…” Benefits of this technique include:

• Openness of information content to all participants;
• Efficiency of information presentation and access;
• A free personalized program of visits for participants;
• Interactivity – members of the network community (students, teachers, pedagogical workers of educational institutions, administration of higher educational institutions, etc.) can leave their own records in the blog, read posts and publications of their colleagues, commenting on messages. Can post and respond to comments, and link posts and comments using hyperlinks.

Benefits of blogging in teaching

Using free network software to plan open lectures, webinars, educational programs, intellectual competitions and other events is made possible by the principles and features of Web 2.0. Despite the fact that school methods offer “closed” questions with clear answers and continue to bring up children within an old cultural paradigm, modern students – pre-schoolchildren – begin to think differently due to ICT technologies. Have been. Therefore, students should be offered “open” questions so that they can understand their “self” and logic and thus develop their position of understanding the environment, self-reflecting on it. Thus, the personality of students is revealed and, accordingly, the identity of the individual is formed; As a result the person will never become a cog in the system.

Comparing the traditional world of corporate education to digital education, Hinchcliffe argues: “This is a far cry from the digital age, where knowledge is ubiquitous, instantly searchable, consumable on demand, and shared by millions daily in online commons. Constantly kept up to date by global contributors, this allows learning – for better or worse, depending on the critic – to be far more situational, on-demand, self-directed, infinitely customized, even that can be thoroughly enjoyable, leading to more intensive participation by all learners” (Hinchcliffe, 2017).

Summarizing the pedagogical potential of blogs, let us first of all emphasize that in the process of acquiring knowledge, transforming knowledge and further publishing one’s works, knowledge is formed on the basis of student relations and communication, that is, interaction. Learn to build. For teachers, the work published by students is an opportunity to draw conclusions about how they transform and express the meanings and strategies they have mastered within the framework of social experience. For students, such a publication is the basis for further reflection and analysis, allowing them to once again turn to their reflections and reconsider them, thus enriching their own experience. The possibility to post comments on posts facilitates feedback and potential support for new ideas, while the chance to include hyperlinks to other resources helps students understand the interrelationships and context of knowledge, its structure and uptake. References to sources help the reader determine how relevant the author’s blog is to his or her beliefs (Labudko, 2013).

Hicks lists general benefits of using blogging as a classroom tool; This improves student engagement with the study material, provides students with more opportunities to collaborate with each other, and enriches students with another channel of communication with the professor (Hicks, 2013). . A university professor’s book review in an open blog has yielded interesting results. There is evidence that such reviews are significantly more comprehensive than even peer reports selected by the editorial office (Young, 2009). In addition to the obvious advantages for distance learning, where instructors and students from different parts can teach and learn together, let us mention some important points made by a group of Spanish colleagues:

• Teacher-student interaction continues in remote mode;

• Blogs are an environment of compromise for students with different mindsets;

• Some weblogs are open to teamwork and group learning;

• It simplifies final evaluation:

• A wider student community can access information about information technology;

• Participation in blogs gives students some experience in using information technology before employment;

• Blogging promotes the skills of informal conversation and creative self-expression. Also, it’s largely understandable that blogs are a bigger effort on the part of teachers than traditional attendance classes:

• Managing blogs is time-consuming for teachers;

• For the results of the project to be accurate, there should be a constant flow of feedback from the weblog from the teacher and fellow students (Lujan-Mora and Juana-Espinosa, 2007).

This idea is clearly supported by many researchers and teachers, for example here: “Community and informal learning platforms require some initial content to ensure that they begin to be effectively adopted by the workforce. This requires investment in content production (short training videos, articles and blog posts that can trigger participation and co-creation)” (Hinchcliffe, 2017).

Read Also: