Blogs

Description
Instructional blogging turns passive participants into active participants. Blog templates make it easy for both students and faculty to publish to the Web. Blogging offers excellent opportunities for faculty to provide direct feedback to students and for students to read and comment on each other’s entries.

Key Advantages

• Provides a greater sense of community
• Allows for extended discussions
• Student collaboration is facilitated
• Instructor-student communications is enhanced
• Direct feedback to students is easier

Key Features

• Blogs are easy to use
• There’s no need to know HTML to publish to an attractive Web page
• Faculty and students can comment on each other’s entries
• Blogs can incorporate images and links to Web pages and other documents (i.e., spreadsheets, word processing documents)

Innovative Uses

• A nursing professor uses a class blog as a place for students to present clinical experiences
• An art appreciation instructor uses the blog to incorporate visuals with text discussions
• An MIS professor uses student blogs as a way to address questions outside of class and use class meetings for more complex issues
• Professors from a wide array of disciplines use blogs to discuss course readings in graduate seminars
• A Freshman Composition instructor uses blogs for students to learn how to provide constructive criticism to other students and give them feedback on their prose
• A campus department promoted a sense of community by using a blog to feature its students, many of whom were enrolled in virtual programs

Getting Started
Review Instructional Blogging: Best Practices & Case Studies

Request a blog or contact Stuart Glogoff at stuartg@email.arizona.edu or 626-5347 for more information.