Teachers & professors are starting to blog in greater numbers. But they’re doing it for different reasons than other professionals. Do you teach? If so, consider the following reasons you might want to get yourself a blog:
- Your blog specifically exists to serve the students and act as an access point to your thoughts, informed opinions, and subject expertise which you can share with them via your blog
- Your blog serves as a more informal online syllabus which can be easily added to or amended, and the interaction between you and your students via the blog is more engaging for everyone
- It circumvents complicated, messy portal and intranet structures whose content management systems might be so complicated to deal with that you’d rather use something simpler
- Potential students interested in your particular area of study will find you online when searching using keywords related to your subject
- Your blog serves as a running historical catalog and commentary of the discussion between you and your students that other students can use to see what kind of teacher you are (in other words, it could boost your subject’s popularity)
- You can use it to help keep in touch and network with your star alumni students
Academic mechanisms are already in place for you to maintain your reputation among your peers, such as journal publication and so forth. Your blog is a wonderful tool you can use to work with your students a way they will appreciate. The subject you teach doesn’t matter. Classes on any subject could benefit greatly from a teacher blog.
2 Comments
yes, that would be a good idea.. until you really start looking for some blog-journal machine to try it out.
If you teach 12-18 year olds, secondary school in my case, you probably have more than one class. Each class has more than 10 subjects at least. So having 10 classes, your blog should have some good categorisation features to provide students to find some meaningfull content, quickly.
And what if you have paralell groups and want to put a specific entry on more than one category. Or if you like to have material available for all groups…
I am not sure if a Blog is the right tool for teachers with 200 students. I think teachers need more than a journal based pubisher and I am sure they need more simpler and cheaper tools than Blackboard, for example .
Excellent points. I was thinking more of college-level teaching, which is more specialized. WordPress, which I use, allows you to assign as many categories to a post as you’d like. A wiki might be an interesting class tool, as well.