The Importance of using Blogs and Wikis in classrooms

If you are looking for new ideas to your classes, this post offers you an overview to use  blogs and wikis in educational field. Lets consider that the informatics development has cover all the areas of life from all people. Now, teaching techniques have been a great complement for students learning. Blogs and wikis are useful websites with a great variety information, these tools have been implemented for second language classes to facilitate the teaching process.

 Blogs and wikis are collaborative websites, and it helps students cooperative skills and using this website they keep in contact with others. For educational purposes the teacher can create a link to enroll students and also the parents to inform the methodology of teaching. 

  Nowdays children have the capacity to manipulated whatever digital object, and appling blogs and wikis for learning will exploit their potencial for a possitive purpose. The creation of blogs and wikis do not demand experienced people. In blogs and wikis you could add images, videos, text, quizzes and so on to facilitate the search of information, everything is in hand. Also, as a techer, you must have to adapt the lessons to the personality of each student. Interpersonal learners  feel free to give opinions or comments  if they are working on those kind of websites, because the are shy  to talk in  classes. 

  

  As Dr Axel Bruns argues "Common to all of these technologies is that they are strongly social and community based". The connection between people is not and obstacule. Under good control students can share with others  from different countries, aditionally foreign teachers can help doubts or questions from an specific topics. 

      

 These tools enable the team members to share knowledge simply and quickly the collective knowledge base of  the group can be efficiently managed and navigated. If effectively deployed, wikis and  blogs  could offer a way to enhance student´s  learning experiences, and deepen levels of learners' engagement and collaboration within digital learning environments. 
Therefore, research should be conducted to determine the best ways to integrate these tools into existing. Learning programmes for students, taking into account the different, but also overlapping, needs of these three audience classes and the opportunities of virtual collaboration between them. Of particular importance  to serve as the "glue" to bind the different forms of Web-based collaboration in order to provide a coherent wholesome learning experience.




Although the potential impact of wiki and blog  technologies on higher education is immense, it is perhaps the combined use of the three applications as 'mind tools'that may yield the most powerful learning experiences. The uses of such technologies to encourage learners' deeper engagement with learning materials, and the affordance of shared working spaces to improve collaboration between learners are desirable outcomes. It is generally held by many educators that students of all ages learn best when immersed within a culturally and socially rich environment in which scaffolding of learning can be achieved. Further, where learners and peers are committed to achieving the same goals, they tend to regulate each other's performances, a positive outcome that can be facilitated through the use of shared, digital learning environments. The combination of wikis and blogs  technologies, then, has the potential to both liberate and tie learners together, creating dynamic learning communities.

























However, this technology is neutral until it delivers content and will lose its effectiveness if it is not applied in a planned and systematic manner. It will, therefore, be important to effectively demonstrate how tutors successfully deploy such technologies in live learning contexts.