Blogging as Professional Practice

It's interesting to observe the network of ideas and thoughts that connect one person to another within the community of bloggers. I first started to follow this network on August 9th when Will Richardson posted on his blog wondering where the blogging best practices were. Brian Crosby, David Warlick, Miguel Guhlin, and I'm sure, many others have also been discussing the question and have begun exploring ways of aggregating the collective knowledge of teachers who are using blogs in their classrooms. This interconnected thought process among these bloggers is probably one of the very best examples of blogging in professional practice. Now, how can we apply that to instruction?

Aside from the question of best practices in blogging, many bloggers are employing pretty high level thinking skills. They summarize an article or something written in another blog, they compare their opinions with the opinions of others, they create metaphors or analogies to explain their ideas, they cite research and statistics about blogging by using images, they comment on other blogs providing recognition to the thoughts of others, they recognize common goals and work to collaborate with other bloggers on those goals, they hypothesize about various topics, they generate important questions about the instructional uses of blogs. All of these fall into the general categories of research based instructional strategies discussed in Classroom Instruction That Works.

Without a strong goal/purpose for using a blog, students will not engage in the learning that can result. So, in addition to looking for best practices, I'm also asking: What are your instructional goals and Which of these strategies would be most effective in improving student achievement by using blogs in your classroom?

technorati tags:instructionalstrategies, bloggingbestpractices, thinkingskills

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