Once Upon a Blog....

As a librarian, I have not yet experimented with blogs with my students in library classes.  However, I do feel that blogs can be a very powerful and educational tool (and one that I will use in the near future).  Blogs can provide students with new forms of participation, new learning resources, and a new form of engagement that offers unique learning opportunities.  Also, students develop knowledge through interaction and dialogue rather than lectures and memorization of facts, they develop interpersonal and communication skills, and its quite easy to use and integrate within class instruction.  

I know that you are probably thinking, "Wow, this blogging thing sounds great! Now, how do I go about actually using this in my class?"  I think when first deciding to integrate blogs (or any technology tool) within instruction, one must identify the learning opportunities or "affordances" associated with the specific uses of classroom blogs, rather than blogging just for the sake of blogging, so as to help decide whether or not the tool is "worth it" for students.  Further, a teacher would need to know: how such a blog needs to be structured, how will students use the blog, and what benefits would teachers and students get from using the blog in order to achieve the instructional goals the teacher desires.  Will your blogs be utilized for the posting of assignments, lectures, homework, quizzes, or notes; writing reflective journals; as online notebooks to differentiate instruction for those with special needs; for small or whole group class discussions; or maybe used individually for personal expressions?

I think that when I do decide to use blogs ( I am creating a blog lesson on book talks) it will be more learner-focused and community-focused rather than teacher-focused.  A library project that I would love for my students to help me with is book talks.  So often I have students asking for book recommendations, or which books are amongst the favorites of students at the school.  I think it would be great for students to recommend and write reviews of books for others as well as for students to post comments as to whether they agree or not with the particular book reviews.  This would extend conversations and allow more students to contribute, take ownership for their learning, and it places students in the role as subject experts.  Further, to make it more community-focused, I would love to involve "experts" from outside the class and school itself such as the actual author of the book participating in the discussions.  I think this would definitely make this library project "worth it."