Affordances of Blogging

At its most basic, a blog is a free, online publishing forum. It can be run by one person or a team and can have any infinite number of topics. Many blogs are centered around a main topic like fashion or teaching. Blogs aren't usually as media centered as glogs or vlogs, focusing on the written word, although writers certainly use videos or pictures to augment posts. Posts are drafted in essentially an online word processing document and may be published immediately or scheduled for any time the author chooses, while adding tags to posts allows readers to filter entries. Wordpress, Medium, and Blogger make blogging easy and free to begin and blogging is also a common option on website builders such as Weeby and Wix. Blogs include a commenting section (that can be turned off), but the discussion is typically more one-sided than discussion boards or social media.

As a learning tool, blogging offers the student the opportunity to become a published author. This affordance drives every aspect of the blogging experience, from designing the page to proofreading for an actual audience to collaborating with other bloggers. This desire to produce quality blog/vlog posts for an authentic audience is potentially intrinsically motivating although the grading aspect and commenting/liking posts provides extrinsic motivation as well. The familiarity of blog platforms is another affordance that makes it easy to use. Even if it’s a new technology, the on-line writing process looks similar to the more familiar Google or Microsoft Word doc.

Looking at different blogging platforms helped me better refine my idea of what I wanted in a blog. As a creator, I found the Wix interface distracting with editing toolbars on the left, right, and top of the screen. Weebly has a more clean interface, with a scrolling left toolbar that has editing tools. Features like photo galleries, contact forms, and embedding videos make blogging on these websites a more robust experience than Blogger, which is just about the posts. For students, Blogger comes free with a Google account and requires minimal set-up.

Potential Uses

As an English teacher, blogs are a natural fit. Unlike social media posts, there is no character limit on a blog post, lending itself to thoughtful, reflective responses. Because independent reading is a standard for K-12 in Oklahoma, it would be easy to have my students create a blog to do reading reflections. I could give a list of possible reflection topics like making textual connections (text to self, text to text, and text to world) and if I ask students to include links or pictures, I think creating a blog post would be the augmentation level of SAMR.

Allowing students to easily read and comment on each other's work would be an enhancement on the traditional reader response although asking students to discuss their reading is relatively low on Bloom’s. A more transformative assignment would be have students add a recording to their responses, like with a Flipgrid. After blogging the textual connections, students could add a video with a 1-5 minute book review and then comment on each other’s videos. Adding the evaluative element would level up the complexity of the task, and if I curated the videos, it could act as ongoing student-led book talks. I often recommend books to students, but I would love it if they could take ownership of recommending and finding books for each other.

Potential Drawbacks

Some schools block blogging platforms as a social media and the potential for spamming/trolling comments. Also, keeping up with 100+ blogs could be cumbersome in addition to a teacher's normal workload. One site I found, EduBlogs, is designed to make classroom blogging tenable. Teachers have a dashboard that updates with each new blog post. The dashboard tracks comments and activity and lists classroom blogs in order of last activity. Students still create their own blog and can personalize it, but EduBlogs allows teachers to not be dragged down by minutiae of checking so many pages.

Final Thoughts

I often have students reflect on their reading, usually as a short written response in class. Blogging responses adds the publishing element of the writing process that is often left out. Writing for an authentic audience typically ensures students will complete the work with more fidelity, especially if they know their peers are reading. When we have class discussions over independent reading, it’s often the same few students contributing. Blogging would give every student a voice, and by requiring students to read/comment on each other's blogs, they will be exposed to different responses that we might not have time for in class. Blogging marries an authentic, real-world audience and building a life-long habit of reflecting on reading/events/thoughts in a way that in-class assignments cannot do. I’m very excited to integrate EduBlogs into my classroom in fall!