Critiques

'Best of the Education Blog' Awards

The 'Best of the Education Blog' awards are a showcase of the educational triumphs within the blogging community. Different blog sites are nominated by educators and enthusiasts alike and around 160 of these are chosen as the cream of the crop. From these 160, eSchool News narrows the field to a mere 32 which are then submitted to the official judging panel. From the 32, 4 winners are chosen to be the representatives of their respective categories.

To be chosen in this way, as a top blog site, gives a good representation of how blogging is progressing and also the common trends in blogs that are appealing to the masses. This will further help blogs evolve into a finely oiled educational tool that supports knowledge retention and gives students, teachers and parents an opportunity to participate in a child's growth as an individual.

The 'Best of the Education Blog' awards can serve as a template for other bloggers who are new to the game and can quickly catch them up to the top bloggers out there by providing them with the tools to preform the job effectively and easily.



Blogging: Advantages of Blogging as a Teaching Tool

This article talks about the use of blogs as a teaching tool. It shows some examples of integration of links and videos and gives some good solid advice and ideas about the use of blogging in a classroom community.

The article tells the reader about the benefits of using blogs, like being able to reflect on the information, research and comment at a time that is convenient to them outside of the classroom time. By doing so, the answers given by the students have to be concise, summarized, and structured, and the questions have to be more to the point. By having to type in a structured proper manor they students are actually working on their typing, writing, grammar and spelling skills. Also, the teacher will be able to post links and other media to the students to answer questions and expand on classroom topics.

Blogging also makes the students review the knowledge covered in class and helps them retain that knowledge and apply it to other circumstances. A teacher might even find it beneficial to get his or her students to follow a blog that another teacher, possibly in another class, school or country. This promotes peer to peer learning, which can be dangerous if not monitored, but when monitored it can be a useful teaching tool.