With technologies and their transition into the classroom, it has become evident that many of these tools are gauged for how effective they are with helping learners. Blogging can be an effective tool within learning environments in the potential benefits that they offer learners. One of these potential benefits for learners by using blogging is being used as creative tasks to promote creativity and critical thinking (Syvyi et al, 2022). By having students create blogs, learners can use prompts to organize ideas and thoughts into a low risk writing activity. In having a low risk writing activity, students have more freedom and confidence to write without limitations and willingness to participate.
Another benefit of having learners write using blogs is improving their argumentative skills (Kasih et al, 2021). Different forms of writing give students a better understanding of how to fully articulate their ideas and points of view. By having blogs, students see this form of writing as a regulated informal approach which is built upon prior technology use. Many learners have some experience using social media and leaving comments on things like pictures and posts. This is where blogging connects their prior knowledge and experiences to help them improve their formal writing skills as they submit posts.
Some resources which I would recommend for using this kind of writing activity is the website Blogger.com and Grammarly. Blogger.com is a free blogging website in which students can create their own blog site. The site is very simple to use and has various prebuilt templates and customization options. Grammarly is a helpful writing assistant tool which can be used to help students build their grammar skills and correct any spelling mistakes. Both of these technologies work well within the scope of using blogs for learning in various learning environments.
References
Kasih, E. N. E. W., Amelia, D., & Fitratullah, M. (2021, October). Unraveling Students’ Attitude of Using Blog for Online Learning in Literature Class. In 2021 Universitas Riau International Conference on Education Technology (URICET) (pp. 419-424). IEEE.
Syvyi, M., Mazbayev, O., Varakuta, O., Panteleeva, N., & Bondarenko, O. (2022). Distance learning as innovation technology of school geographical education. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.08697.
