What's a blog, you may ask, as I once did myself? At it's core, a blog is an online journal that can be used for any number of things, from posting your critique of yesterday's cafeteria food to detailing your thoughts on today's current events, to offering your opinion on where our world will end up tomorrow. It's an easy way of sharing your thoughts with the world.
At another level, however, a blog is a useful tool for education. Blogs can provide an easily accessible means for a teacher to stay in communication with his or her students, regardless of whether or not they made it to class that day, and to provide any information the students may need to understand what they've been taught or what they have to do for homework tomorrow. The possibilities are endless. Even though blogs have only recently exploded into online relevance, they are also a great tool that can be used in a classroom to meet the General Outcomes of the Information and Communications Technology Program of Study. Students can achieve GO C3 by viewing a variety of blogs and analyzing which ones contain valid information. They can achieve GO F2 simply by working with a blog of their own. Blogs are becoming more and more prominent, and they represent just one of the ways that computers and the internet can be part of a person's everyday life. GO P5 would easily be achieved by having a student create hyperlinks within their next blog post. And the list goes on.
There's no question that blogs can be a great tool in the classroom, and that students would have their learning enriched by exploring blogs and creating blogs of their own, and as more and more teachers catch on to this idea, I'm sure we'll witness increasingly creative ways of combining this online resource in the classroom.
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