Blogs and Wikis in Education

1. Blogs and Wikis are great tools to incorporate into the classroom to enhance student learning. Here are three ways that blogs and wikis could be used in K-12 classrooms:

1. Blogs can be used as a journal in classrooms. You could have your students respond to a topic that you select and have them write in their blogs about it. You could also have your students do free writing in the blogs, and let their creativity roll.
2. You could use a wiki page to assist in class projects such as state projects, country projects, etc. The website would be a great resource for the students to use in order to save money on materials that they would normally use to create the projects. Also, if all your students had computer access, it would be easy for their peers to review each other’s projects and also easy for you to have quick access to their project.
3. Blogs could also be used for you students to keep in touch with a pen pal. You could get together with another class and have the students write back and forth through their blog to the other class. It’d be a great way to explore what other classes are doing in another place, and for the students to practice letter writing skills.


2. You could use the RSS readers/aggregators within the classroom setting by creating one that your students are interested in. You could have the students discuss as a group what their interests were and maybe some favorite websites (that are appropriate in an education setting) and place all that into one, so that students would have one place to go to have access to that fun and interesting information. This would also assist in students browsing different websites and maybe stumbling upon some inappropriate sites that they shouldn’t be looking at.

3. There are definitely some positive and negative aspects of using blogs and wikis in the classroom. Here are two pros and two cons to using blogs and wikis in education.
Pros:
- They provide an easy way for you to grade whatever you are having your students complete and there is no confusion on their penmanship.
- They provide an outlet for your students to express how they are feeling, and it’s another tool for communication. If your student was frustrated about something in the classroom, they could communicate with you through their blog without having to be embarrassed in coming forward with their feelings.

Cons:
- They don’t provide an opportunity for children to practice their penmanship and writing skills since students will be typing.
- If your student doesn’t make the information that he/she is writing, they are easily read by other people and that could provide potential problems.