by MU Instructional Designers
September 19, 2024
10-12 min read
Blogs are an engaging way to share information and ideas with students. Blog posts can utilize hyperlinks, videos, images, and hashtags to highlight connections between your content and the real world (UDL Checkpoint 3.2). Because of this opportunity for variety, blogs are a great way to implement UDL (UDL Guideline 1 & Checkpoint 2.5).
Blogs take students beyond the learning management system (LMS), which can lead to broader engagement. They can create a space for conversations across different course sections and semesters. You can also use blogs as an optional supplementary resource for students who want to dive deeper into the content and extend the conversation.
Evidence-Based Practices
A blog is an excellent way to share your personality and your passion for your discipline with your students. You can expand the blog to show connections between your life outside the classroom and your life as a teacher. Your blog can be more professional—related only to your discipline and research, or more relaxed and personal, including topics like hobbies and vacations. When you use an instructional blog, students can get to know you as a whole person, which enhances student-to-teacher engagement and recruits interest through authenticity (UDL Checkpoint 7.2). Another benefit is that students can comment on your posts, extending the conversation beyond the limits of classroom time. They can even keep in touch post-graduation. Your blog is an excellent opportunity to expand student perspectives by introducing them to voices from the margins. Consider who you might include in an interview, what other experiences might be relevant to your topic? What perspectives might you want to engage with through commentary or analysis? You can share examples from cultures and viewpoints that may be different from your own, and encourage students to share their own in the comments. The strategy of incorporating diverse perspectives is crucial to Diversity & Meaning, which is the intersection of Content (UDL) and Connection (Equity) in the Learning for Equity Framework (Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy [CSP]).Make your blog authentic.
Teacher Presence
Diverse Perspectives
Sort topics in a meaningful way so that students can find relevant places to engage with your content. Keep the blog clean so that your audience can find what they are looking for in short order. That gives them more time to reflect on what you are sharing and respond in a way that extends the conversation. Tags are an excellent way for you to organize blog content. Tags are key words or phrases that you can use to label your posts, which makes it easier for your students or external audiences to find and engage with your content. Clear organization, including the use of tags, can provide options for comprehension by using cues and prompts to draw attention to critical features (UDL checkpoint 3.2). Chunked Keep posts manageable in length — consider the Active Learning guidelines on chunking: Chunking information like this helps guide information processing (UDL checkpoint 3.3). If that doesn’t seem long enough, you can always tease further discussion for the next post—kind of like a podcast. The serial format keeps readers engaged and looking forward to your next installment and can help students maximize transfer and generalization through connecting new information to prior knowledge (UDL checkpoint 3.4).Make your blog engaging.
Organized
Blog posts can often serve as springboards for asynchronous conversation using the comments section. When crafting your blog posts, consider how you might promote or foster that conversation—you could bring up questions, prompt readers to reflect on personal connections, challenge folks to debate the issue, etc. When students use what they learn in the post to engage with others, they increase their own learning and help others at the same time. This promotes student-to-content engagement and utilizes Personal Context, which is the intersection of Content (UDL) and Belonging (Equity) in the Learning for Equity Framework (Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy [CSP]).Provide options for student participation.
Most likely many of your students have already created (or someday will create) content for the web. Your blog gives you the opportunity to model inclusivity and digital citizenship in a way that is aligned with our mission statement: Our mission is to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character and Christian faith in preparation for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society. When creating your blog content, consider students who may have different cultural backgrounds than you. Be careful not to make assumptions about what your students already know. A benefit to blogging is that you can clarify and/or provide background knowledge within the text of your content OR by using hyperlinks to other web content. Consider this any time that you use or reference . . . Digital accessibility is where inclusion practices overlap with digital citizenship skills (discussed next). These are the technical tools and decisions that ensure that your blog is accessible to diverse learners, particularly ones using assistive technologies. Check out our Digital Accessibility page for details. In addition to digital accessibility, there are a few additional components to digital citizenship, which our General Education program defines as, “the development of the skills and knowledge needed to effectively use digital technologies to participate ethically in social and civic life.” As discussed above under “Teacher Presence,” blogs are a great way to incorporate more of your own personality, experiences, and opinions, but it’s important to model for your readers where those lines are drawn in terms of personal privacy. Avoid sharing information that could compromise your personal safety or the safety of another. More details on privacy issues in web content are available on Create a Blog or ePortfolio from the Tech Support Knowledge Base. Copyright considerations for blogging are two-fold: respecting the copyright of others and protecting your own content. Blogs often leverage images and videos, and whenever you use ones that you didn’t create personally, model for students the proper crediting procedures. Messiah’s Library has created an excellent resource for understanding copyright that we recommend you check out for details on how to ethically use that content. Since you’re also creating your own content in your blog and publishing it to the world (or at least your students), it’s important to choose a Creative Commons license that reflects how you want your own work to be treated by others. Web content has become notorious for misinformation (and even disinformation). Within the content of your blog posts, you can show students how to leverage reliable information — establish the credibility of your sources and use citations, when applicable. This practice also extends into the comments section of blogs, so use that space to ask folks about the sources of their information and push back on misinformation. This will help students see the value of information literacy in the online environment. Responding to misinformation isn’t the only way to model digital citizenship, engaging in the comment section is also a way to model civil dialog and demonstrate how much we have to learn from each other. It’s important to establish the rules and expectations of that conversation space just as you would with online discussions in the LMS. Check the space frequently (or set up notifications) so that you can intervene if necessary. Model ethical behavior.
Accessible to Everyone
Digital Citizenship
Privacy
Copyright
Information Literacy
Civil Discourse
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