Weblogs in the Classroom: Adding Transparency and Collaborative Learning

In his book Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, Will Richardson discusses the importance for teachers and upcoming teachers to familiarize, learn, and use online technology, like Weblogs, in their classrooms. By using Weblogs, teachers and students are able to create an online class portal to communicate and display information about the class and course materials. This adds convenience and transparency for the parents and their children, which means that these materials are no longer restricted to the physical location of the classroom.

In addition to adding convenience and transparency, classroom Weblogs also create an opportunity for collaborate learning with others via the Internet. This opens a vast medium of knowledge and possibilities for students that would otherwise not be available if learning was limited solely to the classroom.

I completely agree with Richardson‘s concept of online collaborative learning. In chapter 2, he provides an example that I found to be very exciting for his class and potentially other students and readers. In the section titled Collaborative Space,he describes how his class utilized Weblogs as an online reading guide for the novel, The Secret Life of Bees  written by Sue Monk Kidd. During this process, she would respond and follow the students’ reading and interpretations on their blog. This must have been an awesome experience for their class, which wouldn’t have occurred in just a classroom setting alone.

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