Recent developments in the educational field worldwide give us the impression that the blogs are soon becoming a must-have platform for teaching in schools. A blog is not just a portal of information, but it is a platform that encourages the reader and exchange opinions, ideas, and comments with them. It is true that a blog should be informative enough because the reader relies on it to gather additional information, but along with it, it should also be interactive enough to convince the reader and maintain a lifelong relationship with them. Today blogs are becoming one of the key mediums to deliver education and tutor students. A vast number of institutions have adopted this method to educate their students and urged teachers to initiate their individual blogs. It helps the teachers to evaluate their students’ knowledge and take opinions and feedbacks from them directly. Even students start their own blogs to help their classmates and this helps to build their connection stronger.
Role of blog as a platform for teaching in schools
A blog helps the teachers monitor and analyse the development of their students very effectively. While they publish a topic, their students read it and find a major piece of information that they were probably searching. A blog also helps in stimulating the knowledge of a student that cannot be done by the general teaching methods. Teachers can observe their students and judge how much their mental ability is developing. This helps teachers bring their students to the right track, and the gap between their teaching and learning is minimised.
How does a blog act as a platform for teaching in schools and similar organisations?
Nowadays the older methods of communication between the teacher and the student fail to work effectively. Students might like to have a more social interaction where they can involve other students too, and learn within a comfortable environment. They want their fellow students as their readers while writing an assignment and seek opinions from them. Therefore, a blog works as an effective tool in maintaining learning while socialising and helps the student in practising certain skills. For example, if a student has doubt on a particular subject, he/she can post it on the blog and his fellow students or teachers can help him/her to clarify the doubt. A blog can be a great avenue to share ideas and views with teachers and students. Also, it acts as a medium for parents to interact with the curriculum if they are given permission to access the blog. Meanwhile, a blog can be searched in search engines which help the teachers and students of other institutions find relevant information.
Moreover, learning through blogs can be easier than the traditional learning methods that have been followed so far. Nowadays students might like to get involved in something very creative and interactive. A blog helps them actively participate with the other pupils and stay motivated in their educational journey. Although not physically, they can stay virtually connected to other members 24 x 7 using blogs and forums. Students also love to see their content get published on the web and enjoy when others read it and follow their blog. Gradually, they receive a fan following which motivates them further to publish more and share more content.
Ideas on using blogs for educational purposes
A blog can be written for certain purposes, or you can combine one with multiple types and categories. Especially, when you don’t want to write it professionally, you can merge multiple topics into one blog. For studies and institutional purpose, we can generally find these types of blog on the web:
How-to topics
The “How-to topics” include helpful articles related to specific content. This kind of blog helps readers in finding a solution for their needs. This can be a tutorial based on a certain project or a practical work that the other students find difficult to accomplish. How-to blogs may contain pictures, videos, and other media content too.
Theory and Research
Research topics include the detailed blog posts about a specific topic from a subject. A research blog might include how-to topics, theory, case studies, images, videos, etc. They contain an in-depth knowledge about the subject and students prefer bookmarking them and coming back again and again to read.
News and Announcement
News and announcement blogs provide the up-to-date information about an event or organisation in general. These blogs are kept short and keep updated with every new information. Students like reading them to stay updated with the latest happenings in the Institute. News blogs are updated on a frequent basis, and students prefer bookmarking them or returning to read again.
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Reviews
Review blogs contain a detailed study and evaluation of a product or topic that helps other students to understand it accurately. Reviews can be helpful at times when a student prefers using or trying it. For example, you post a review about your field trip to the Sundarbans, which will help your fellow students to learn about the place. You can also post photos and videos in a review blog because they provide a clearer picture of the subject.
Informal
An informal blog normally does not follow the academic standards of writing, but they can be a micro article or even a lengthy one in a casual language. Such blogs might not always be helpful, but students can consider them as a boredom killer.
Micro-blog
A micro-blog consists of tiny blog posts those are normally linked to a separate blog or link.
Video blogs
The video blog is similar to any general blog except for the written content the blog is presented in the form of a video. Here you can post about anything related to any subject with a piece of extra information. Video blogs have proven to be more effective because it comes in an audio-visual form.
Photoblogs
Photo blogs are photo-centric. In such blogs, you can post the visual images on a topic, for example, the images of your field trip or a project in the making.
Podcasts
Podcasts are the audio or video shows.
Platforms for educational blogs
Edublogs
Most institutions seek for a platform that provides all the features required in education. And none other than Edublogs can offer that amount of safety and functionality to build a blog for students. Edublogs is powered by WordPress, and it gives you the benefit of writing posts and creating multiple pages. Your blog can be customised just the way you want and that too for free. With the unlimited options, you can upload multiple files and media content and get an ad-free blog. Edublogs sites are mobile friendly, which means, students can access it from their mobile phones in a responsive form. Edublogs offers you privacy options those keep your content safe. You can even create a batch of blogs and users and exports full database from any external storage or hard drive.
Edublogs is specifically designed for individual teachers so that they can share any information with their students. Here you will find a large community of educators and students and adopt a lot of information from them. Edublogs blogs are student safe, which means the content is filtered and does not irritate you with the annoying ads as the other platforms do. You can easily manage your class and students and embed any content in them. Plus, you will find a lot of beneficial tools and plugins like maps, tables, etc. for making your blog more productive. With private options, you can control who can view the blog and protect the pages with a password. You can also track your visitors and view which posts are popular.
So all these for the teachers who want to share their knowledge in a unique way other than adopting the traditional role of providing education to students. Not only this, but Edublogs also possesses its sister platform called CampusPress, so let’s find how it helps in the development of education.
Meet CampusPress
Where Edublogs, is designed for the teachers, CampusPress is developed for the entire schools, universities, and districts. Which means whether you are a teacher or a student or any other member of the institution, you can use CampusPress to share your knowledge. A large number of schools and universities use this platform for creating e-portfolios, projects, and lots more stuff related to education.
CampusPress for K12
CampusPress provides the entire set of features that a K12 student needs. It provides a safe and secure platform which is easily managed by the entire school. CampusPress is run by the same Edublogs team and is considered as the largest publishing arena for students. Whether you want to create an educational blog or a website, CampusPress contains the power to form a set of both. With this site, you can create e-Portfolios, projects, diaries, and even a complete website containing the mixed stuff.
Apart from all these, if you want to create a complete website for your school or university, then CampusPress shall be an ideal platform to do so. It is a user-friendly platform which is fast, convenient and designed for intermediates as well as experts. Additionally, CampusPress offers detailed user guides, video tutorials, and face to face training too. The site offers mobile friendly blogs so that teachers and students can read them from their mobile devices without losing any resolution. With loads of functionality and management tools, you can customise your blog any way you want.
CampusPress also supports network management and user authentication so that you can have complete control over your privacy and network settings. It also lets you integrate with Google Apps, LDAP, SAML, and LTI that makes creating websites and users more effectively. Along with these, CampusPress gives you the ability to manage students, moderate your content, and track their learning with its inbuilt social network. Here you can follow each other, discover more educational content, and leave feedbacks to the writer, which will help in expanding the community and published work. Teachers can even approve blog posts and send feedback privately, run reports, and organise students into groups and classes.
Kidblog
Kidblog is another blogging platform for education which is student and teacher friendly. Students can create their own blogs with this site and even do their teachers. Kidblog is a safe and secure platform that allows students to write with safety and teachers can monitor their activities within the blogging community. The platform is suitable for any K12 student because it avoids distractions so that students can focus on their writing. Teachers can manage and organise all posts and comments through a simple dashboard and also moderate them.
Kidblog keeps the students motivated in their writing by giving a valuable purpose and a reliable audience. Students can engage with a global community and write for their classmates. The site also offers writing instructions so that students can stay engaged in drafting, rewriting, editing, revising, publishing, and commenting. Teachers can provide feedbacks and moderate content across all stages.
Kidblog can be used by students for a number of purposes. These include creative writing, math problem-solving for dealing with mathematical problems and demonstrate its understanding, the book club for helping students understand literature, science notebooks for practising science and understanding it, digital portfolio for learning through pictures and videos, and lots more. Kidblog supports Google Apps authentication and organising students in multiple class sections. It is built for the elementary and middle school so that students and teachers can get involved in creative writing projects and various plans and resources.
Conclusion
We are now aware how blogging plays a pivotal role in the field of education in such a way that the whole educational system is changing from its traditional methods once used. Blogs are not only a platform to deliver information, but also a platform that helps to develop a community within an organisation or institution for sharing knowledge among its members. It can be easily predicted that blogging is the future of education and going to be a primary medium to deliver knowledge fruitfully. So, it can be easily predicted that the day is not far when blogging takes a major role and act as the best platform for teaching in schools.
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