Mobile Blogging: Benefits and Resources for Teachers

Many teachers reflect on their daily classroom interactions using a classroom blog that’s accessible to parents and students. Frequently, these blogs reflect on the content, skills, and resources used in class on any given day. “What worked” ,“what didn’t work” , and “what I’d do different” are common themes amongst many teacher blogs.

The primary issues I’ve had with the blogging process for classroom reflections are consistency and accuracy. Since I typically blog at the end of the day (or lately, the end of the week), I forget some of the meaningful and trivial events (both of which many parents like to hear about) that happened during each specific class. Rather than waiting until the end of the day to blog, why not do it during class as I’m walking around the room and monitoring student progress? Mobile blogging provides a great solution for achieving this.

Benefits of Mobile Blogging for Teachers:

• Builds student accountability for progress: when students see their teacher providing an electronic transcript of classroom events on-the-spot, this serves to help students stay on task


• Enhances classroom reflections: mobile blogging removes memory gaps that typically occur at the end of the day


• Provides “real-time” reflections


• Seamlessly publish classroom media (images of student work, audio reflections, videos, etc.)


• Leverages teacher time during formative assessments


• Provides additional legitimacy for the use mobile devices in the classroom, which may helpadopt new norms and school policies


• Constant communication: if you use Twitter as a blogging tool, you can receive instant notifications when someone replies to your classroom tweets (students could also do this from their mobile devices in class, which would provide you with instant and archived communication)


• Classroom management: while both “traditional” and mobile blogging foster a community of learners, mobile blogging makes you more accountable for your classroom management. Who wants to write about how students are acting out of control? That’s certainly one thing I’m inclined to forget at the end of the day, but if I’m blogging right then-and-there, I make more efforts to cease ill behavior.

Right now, the biggest concern I’ve had with mobile blogging is my typing abilities on the iPhone. Has blogging from the iPhone been more efficient than simply writing down what happened during each class and then inputting these reflections into my blog at the end of the day? Not by much at this point. However, I do know that I have become far more efficient with the iPhone keyboard interface as a result of mobile blogging. Additionally, we can continue to expect the keyboard on these mobile devices to improve over time. While I may not be saving a whole lot of time right now, I’m acclimating myself to the processes associated with mobile blogging.

If you’d like to get involved with mobile blogging, consider exploring the resources below that describe a multitude of mobile blogging tools.

Source: k12mobilelearning.com