Blogs

     Blogging has changed all the traditional ways of communicating, and it is so, thanks to Internet, again, the magic word of these days, technology! The days when people sat down to write notes and post cards to their pen pals are gone. Fortunately, we never stop learning. There are always new, exciting ways to integrate teaching techniques to stimulate our students in the process of learning, especially with the surge of social media and blogging (Fioriello, 2009).

     To blog is mainly to write, post, express or share opinions, ideas, experiences, knowledge with another individual or groups of individuals who have similar interests; this group could be called a community of bloggers that inspire and motivate each other through commenting, one of the key feature of a blog (LeFever, 2007). Most blogs allow their users to write and submit a comment on a blog post, whether the post is written or an image. This commenting aspect of the blogs is what differentiates them from other static websites. They are interactive.

      Depending on the content and on how the content is delivered or written, blogs are of different types. Firstly, regarding the contents, they could be personal or corporate and organizational blogs. Personal blogs are created to write about one’s personal reflections about life, they function more likely as private diaries. Conversely, corporate and organizational blogs are mainly created for business purposes. Secondly, regarding how the content is delivered or written, blogs can be classified by genre, by media type and by device. By genre, these types of blogs focus on a particular subject, such as political blogs, travel blogs, educational blogs, among others. By media type, these are blogs that comprise videos, links, photos, etc. By device, these kinds of blogs are defined by the means used to write or communicate the information, namely, mobile phones or PDA; in this case, they are called moblogs (Wikipedia, 2010).

     My experience as a student and as a teacher tells me that we never stop learning, and most important, we learn by doing. Reading about the usefulness of a blog and creating my own one, has provided me with the knowledge to teach and train my students as well as some colleagues to work with this tool for educational purposes.