Thing 4 - Blogs in Education

I hadn't really spent much time thinking about it before but blogs allow a form of writing that would be hard to replicate using traditional tools. In most classrooms students submit writing assignments to a single evaluator which is graded, returned and discarded. It's a single static learning event designed to measure specific criteria at that point in time in the students life. For many students their only motivation is to receive the grade.

Posting to a blog becomes a learning process for the creator of the original post and for those that comment or contribute to the ideas being explored. Blogs become a conversation allowing the creator to learn by throwing their ideas onto a world stage were anyone can read and respond. It changes the writers attitudes and motivation for writing because their audience has changed and their writing becomes a living document allowing them to explore ideas indefinitely.

Take the EduBlog Insights (Anne Davis): A Rationale for Educational Blogging as an example. Anne Davis began this blog as a way of exploring this idea on January 17th 2007. To date she's received 82 responses spanning from that date to just a couple of days ago.
The learning and exploration of this topic continues.

So how do we get this tool infused into our classrooms? What does our school district need to do to support and promote the use of blogs?