Blogging in the Classroom

Well, I started initially using the internet in the classroom for two reasons... First of all, because there is of course a wealth of educational materials available on the web, but secondly to show the relevancy of history to our own lives, since newsflashes about historical discoveries are released every day!

Blogging for me grew out of that... Every time I found a link that I thought might interest my colleagues, I'd fire off an email. By now, the masses of emails I send out are probably legendary! :-)

So, after a while, to try to spare my friends' and colleagues' email inboxes, I started a personal blog or "web log" - like a kind of interactive diary - last summer as a clearinghouse for these links, and to update folks back home on my ongoing adventures both in research and in real life during my annual trip to Venice, Italy.

Soon, it occurred to me that my own personal blog was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what blogging had the potential to do... that is, to spark and fire learning collaborations across time, space and generations!

I've since run nearly half a dozen blogs with different foci depending on the class. Through my classroom blogs, I've tried to encourage the idea of history and education as a constantly evolving, thoroughly collaborative process. I post items and comment on blogs of friends and colleagues, they post on mine, and I encourage students to do the same! My use of blogging in the classroom is still experimental and I'm still trying to work out the bugs, but the results of my collaborations so far have been heartening, even just on an interpersonal level. As one student wrote, "Hahah it's weird, even though I see teachers as people now, it's hard for me to think that they like the same things that I like." Hopefully, that's about to change, as professors and students join together online to share their interests and to develop together a lifelong love of learning!!