What are the impacts of blogging towards high school students?

Answer 1

Much of popular culture still sees a typical blogger as someone who incessantly reports on what he or she has for breakfast, what music he or she is listening to, and more. People find it hard to believe that someone would write a diary, yet make it public for others to read. They ask both why would someone want to make private information public, and why would someone else want to read someone else's rather banal diary. But this media-influenced perception of blogging is very limiting. Blogging takes on many shapes and sizes, and some of these are well suited for education. Many high school educators are experimenting with blogs in their classrooms, and encouraging their pupils to blog. On the whole, these experiments fall into two general categories: * blogs as digital portfolios * blogs as reflective devices that accompany both the pupil's individual, and the class's collective, learning process Though there's a great deal of overlap in these categories, they seem to spring from different educational emphases. When blogs are used as portfolios they primarily aggregate the writing assignments of the pupil, permitting both the pupil and the teacher an overview of the pupil's work. In this sense, the blog as portfolio is primarily a tool for evaluation. A portfolio blog can, however, also be used as an editing tool for work in progress. Versions of assignments can be saved, and of course expanded, changed, and edited. Numerous schools are content to use blogs in this way. They encourage pupils to save their work to their blogs, and in this way also have that work accessible to them both from school and from home. (On the elementary school level blogs are often used as spaces for creative writing, and the comments that blogs permit often serve as encouragement for pupils to be much more prolific than they might be when not writing to "an audience".) It is when blogs are perceived as reflective devices, however, that their true power becomes evident. Unlike pre-internet times, today's high school pupils are expected to access information from numerous sources beyond the textbook and the materials inside the school library. Blogs permit pupils to copy snippets of information that they find useful to them in the materials that they encounter (primarily on the web), "quote" them, and respond to them - with comments, questions, and (here's that word again) reflections on what they've read. As pupils collect materials from numerous sources and save them to their blogs, they construct their own understanding of a particular subject. In addition, when it comes time to prepare a finished work, they have an easily accessible notebook that contains the various sources they've used, and their own thoughts on those sources. But blogs aren't only "personal", or "individual" tools. Classrooms of pupils (or cross-classroom groupings of pupils) can share with others, and reflect with others on the materials that they've found on similar subjects. Via a blog, a pupil can make his or her thoughts "public", and other pupils can react to those thoughts, contribute to them, criticize them, and make use of them. The information landscape into which today's high school pupils grow is a landscape overflowing with information. Blogs offer them a means of examining and making sense of that information, both individually and as groups. == ==