To blog, or not to blog

At the beginning of this month I had the chance to go to a seminary about education and blogging. It called my attention for a couple of reasons I’ll mention in a sec. As I said in my first post, blogging never called my attention but, since I found how interesting and fun this can be, my thoughts and opinions are being modified a bit.

Well, as I said before, the seminary called my attention because it announced blogging to be “the new way of learning”, interacting between teachers and students and also because it remarked the fact that technology is, nowadays, the only tool that many students have in order to study and increase their knowledge. Just think about Wikipedia which is an online encyclopedia. It has it all!

The lecturer said that teachers should include this methodology (blogging) in their teaching process in order to relieve all the work they have to do. Imagine how much a teacher has to do to mark tests and essays during the whole weekend because, obviously, cannot do it in classes, where he/she devotes all the time on teaching and planning new classes. I thought it would be nice to have all your pupils doing their homework, researches or essays online and then, at home (or practically wherever you are) check what they have done. That is amazing.

Some can complain that students will be even lazier because they won’t do an effort on reading and writing and analyzing most of the things they do and will only copy and paste everything they find. Actually, and contradicting this thought, if you Google something, you’ll have to read a lot before finding what you really need. Subsequently, to express what you want to say you’ll need to clarify your ideas and then post it… after checking that your other classmates haven’t posted the same in their blogs.

In addition, computing is what the students know the most nowadays. Therefore, why shouldn’t a teacher take advantage of this by giving them and bringing the students what they really like? The only drawback we can find when talking about blogging is the fact that only 50% of all the population in Chile has internet connection at home or at least, have access to it, which can be a major problem to face if blogging wants to be incorporated as a teaching and learning tool. Another problem is having students that don’t really want to do anything with it but that is up to every teacher and his/her teaching abilities.

Personally, blogging was and IS a good thing to be done. Firstly, it makes you think and be careful on what you post (you don’t want everybody to realize all the mistakes you make in a sentence). Secondly, you can write as much as you want of whatever you have in mind to write about. Isn’t that perfect? One of my assignments was writing about my favorite website but, as I didn’t have one, I wrote about my favorite music style and it was still accepted.

With no doubts, blogging should be used to teach in classrooms (or should I say everywhere?). I will do it for sure. I hate wasting paper in things that can be done in a pc. You see? There is another advantage: is environmentally friendly. To conclude, I have to admit that education has gone to old with its methods and techniques. Christopher Columbus was taught centuries ago just as we are being taught these years. We have to start a new way of learning, and blogging, who knows, may be part of it.