Ideas for using blogs in a social education context and an Australian learning tools project

Web 2.0 tools, like blogs, can be powerful assets for student learning in the classrooms of social educators. In this article the author describes blogED, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education and Training (DET) blogging tool. A technology application, a blog or weblog, is a personal website, organised like a diary or journal where authors can go online and write regular entries. blogED is now available for use by teachers and students in public schools after an extensive development phase in 2009. This tool is one of a suite of new technologies released in the Learning Tools Project (LTP) as part of the Connected Classrooms Program (CCP). Since March 2010, more than 1,000 principals have registered to give their teachers blogED access; a further 19,000 blogs have been created in these schools with approximately 142,500 students actively using blogED on a daily basis. Users of this tool can connect within a classroom, across a school site, from home, and with other schools, and out into the world. The article describes two examples of how teachers used blogED during the development phase; the first is set in a high school context where 'participatory democracy' was the focus, and the other in a primary school classroom where students studied the First Fleet. In the Appendix is a table of suggestions for how blogED might be considered pedagogically, in this instance, with the NSW model of Quality Teaching.