Blogs and Wikis in the Classroom

Blogs and wikis are being used in many interesting and innovative way including the ability for students and teachers to communicate both inside and outside of the classroom in a fun and unique way. Both teachers and students can have their own pages to share and their work and ideas. Not only can you see anothers progress you can respond to them as well instantly. Teachers are able to post assignments, as well as links to help the student complete the assignment. They have the opportunity to share endless amounts of information that may not be accessable in the classroom. With the blogs and wikis technology in the classroom students have the opportunity to share their classroom experiences with their parents when they get home. All the student has to do is bring up the teachers page and parents can see everything their child is doing in school.

Aggregators are web applications that feed web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. These could be very beneficial in a classroom setting if the information being viewed was beneficial to the student and teacher. Such information may include the breakfast and lunch schedule, weather, after school programs, or school sponsored events coming up. Besides general information aggregators could be used in specific classrooms such as a world affairs, where the latest news headlines could be fed to the class.

Blogs and wikis in education could be great tools for communication between teachers, students and parents. They are easily accessable and fairly user friendly. Blogs and wikis are also great teaching tools for many computer applications, and would be very beneficial for a microcomputers class. However, blogs and wikis could create a dependency on computers in the classroom if the entire class was based on them. One on one communication is key in the classroom, but blogs and wikis could create a reliance on online communication. While online communication is great and helpful in the classroom we should not use it as the only way for teachers to communiate with students and vice versa.