In my first post based around the idea of getting students to blog, I explored the important question of Why? Following that, and assuming we've come to the conclusion that there are some strong rationales for using blogs with high school literacy coursework, the next important questions become Where? and How?
As in: we've decided blogging can be a great thing for learning outcomes, but where and how are they going to do that?
The four most attractive free blogging tools for me appear to be Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr and Posterous (Spaces).
And of those, I have to admit I think that Tumblr would be the one that would appeal the most to my 16 and 17-year-old students. If fact, I've already heard some students talking about finding things on Tumblr, so perhaps there is already a link there. Posterous would have been an equal favourite, but their recent transition to something called Posterous Spaces does, I think, cloud their offering with a bit too much information and the potential for confusion or overload.
In the end, however, I realised that the best person to evaluate and eventually choose the blogging platform for each student will be the student him/herself. In fact, this becomes a very useful way of making the blog platform selection a learning task in itself.
So basically, I think I will start by presenting the four free blogging tools above as initial options, give my own opinions about each, and then give the students an assignment to choose their own blogging platform (they may, of course, go outside the selections I've introduced) with some rationales for their choices.
Before my kids even blog, there are chances to make blog platform selection an active part of the Literacy and Oral Communications outcomes in our VCAL curriculum.
I wonder what they'll end up going with?
And I love not really knowing in advance!
;-D
