Blogs can be used as a way of structuring the communication arising between teachers and students during a course. The students can also use blogs to interact with other students and stakeholders outside the classroom, turning blogs into a resource that other people can use in an authentic context. This is something which motivates the students.
Blogs are a suitable interaction tool for sharing experiences, discussing issues and making decisions. Blogs link the degree programme in question to the outside world, which can motivate the students and seem relevant to them because they will then be working with authentic problems.
Blogs can be used as part of the preparation for your teaching. Blogs can be used in several ways, for instance as part of preparation for your teaching, with the students writing blog posts before class containing questions about the texts of the day. These questions can be dealt with in class and combined with whatever else you have planned.
Blogs can serve as a place for you to present activities which are then answered by the students using the comments feature; and blogs can also be used to hand in activities for peer reviewing by the other students as part of their preparation for class.
You should not expect the students to be experienced bloggers, so it may be a good idea to start small by introducing a course blog in which the students can post their assignments or links which are relevant for the course. The next step could be a class blog in which you write posts and the students comment on them. And finally, you can ask the students to create and use group blogs in which they make blog posts and comment on each other’s posts.
If you let the students make individual or group blogs, these can be used by the students to reflect on their own experiences based on the course syllabus and on their own learning process. Both you and the students can comment on these blogs.
