June 28 / Class Journal

This was my first time creating a blog. I've been interested other times in learning about blogs, and about the possibilities they offer for teaching as well. I've read quite a lot about their possible uses and after this first contact with it, I can guess the few following ideas.

As long as I see it, blogs increase interaction level with students, which is highly desirable to get them involved in their own learning process. They also can hook and motivate them for different reasons:

- as their posts can be read by everyone in the class or even by other people, they feel their work is important and that they are responsible for it, so they try to do their best.

- they can also participate in other students' blogs, making comments, so they feel their opinion is taken into account.

- including new communication and information technologies in the class itself motivates pupils as they face less boring and traditional lessons (in which they used to be too passive), and they're given the opportunity to "play" while learning.

Besides their motivation potential, blogs can be appliable at many subjects, and in many ways, especially reinforcing collaborative learning. We can create a blog to compile scientific news, to provide students with resources about different topics, to upload their homework results, to share information about any interesting issue...

Apart from these first impressions about their utility, I can also share some impressions about my first blog creation experience. I have to say that, although with a bit of help at the beginning, I've found it quite easy to create a blog using blogger.com. Design of templates is also very intuitive, so I've been playing with colours, photographs, backgrounds, etc. I hope you like my blog!