Student Blogs: A Definite Part of My Future Classroom

Once I was introduced to the idea of having students blog, I was hooked! As a student, I was feeling more connected to the course and the students in the class. The conversations happening beyond the four walls of the classroom added a whole other dimension (an exciting one!) to the course, and I believe I was learning more than course content by blogging. In fact, I was able to learn something for each of these 10 reasons!

Thus, I see so many ways that a blog can benefit students and make a math class come alive. Let's take a look into how I envision this coming to life on both the teacher and the student end.

The Teacher Side of Things. My cooperating teacher has a class website that allows her to communicate many parts of the class with her students. They can view items such as the online textbook, assignments, answer keys, important class information, and more. I see this as an excellent way to convey information to students and parents about what is going in inside the classroom. Although student blogging is not a part of her classroom, I see that her model can be expanded to include blogging to create even more benefits for students.

If I were to make a class blog, it would have different pages for assignments and answer keys, important class information, a class calendar, links to commonly used sites (desmos, geogebra, etc.), additional resources to help learn course content, my personal blog posts, and more. I would loosely model it after Zach Cresswell's page. I plan to integrate technology into my future classroom through various online activities from Desmos, Geogebra, the Math Twitter Blogosphere (#MTBOS), and more; thus, this would be a nice place for me to post links for these activities for absent students, students who would like additional practice, and a common place to access them in class. A teacher having a blog has so much potential for efficiency in the classroom as well as potential for immense transparency about your classroom, both of which I would advocate for.

The Student Side of Things. A student having their own blog gives the student so much power to become better, well-rounded students. Literacy is huge for students, and blogging serves as a great avenue for digital, written, performing, viewing, speaking, reading, and listening literacy skills to be developed. This blog can be used across multiple classes, which allows the student to practice literacy skills in each discipline. Specifically with math, there is so much  potential to work on mathematical literacy, an area a lot of students need development.

With class activities, student can post reflective blog posts about the activity so that the teacher can get a better scope of how the individual student is learning course content. If a blog post is the method of submission, it is an excellent way to elicit student thinking and get inside the student's head. Students can write out a response, post pictures of their work, post a video of them explaining their work, and more. They can even do more than one of these in one post! As a result, the student can better convey their understanding to the teacher and be more accurately assesed,

On the more organizational side of things, having information about the class posted in one, convenient location only makes things easier for students. Plus, if comments on other student's blog posts are required, a blog offers a space to have the other blogs linked.

Students get to create it and make it their own. It gives students a voice. It connected students in a way they love to connect--digitally. This only begins to crack open what blogging can do for students!

Where This Could Become Problematic. There are definitely a lot of areas where this model could become problematic. Some of them are

• students having limited or nonexistent internet access at home or in the classroom,
• having to take class time to go over the process of creating and using a blog effectively,
• the potential for students to be inappropriate or unproductive,
• the potential for unequal benefits for communication between students, and  
• if parents be on-board for students being present online in this manner. 

While I recognize these areas for potential problems, I believe that there is so much for students to gain from this experience and would choose to implement these in my classroom in a heartbeat. They can stake the skills they gained from using a blog later in life, no matter what they choose to do. Student blogging is bigger than my classroom, and that's why I want it to be a part of it.