In current
days we are immersed in the society of communication and informatics. The communication
media has reached such an importance worldwide that the education cannot simply
be indifferent to this. The Education has gone through a quick adaptation
process in order to go side by side with the new technologies in order to achieve
goals more efficiently. The ICT may fulfill with a varied number of different functions,
among those we can enunciate that they are useful for:
Information
processing: through the processing of information we can develop new knowledge,
theories and at the same time new learning. In order to make this possible,
teachers can use blogs to achieve this purpose more effectively. Blogs offer teachers
the opportunities to process information and to make their students to create collaborative
content. In this way, it is not only the teachers the ones who create the
content but also the students, thus creating new learning scenarios contributing
to a constant formation, at all times and at all places. Blogs then, become
very handy in the manner that students are not limited to a synchronous class. They
can work on their blogs from a local computer, a mobile phone or a tablet, at
all time, from any place and at their own pace, and very important also, it is
the fact that the content and activities can be often very engaging,
motivational (imageries, videos, audio files, webinars, live events and more)
many of these options lead students to learn through motivation in terms of
being working interactively in real time, with real people and about real
situations. Not mention that these sort of activities facilitate the teaches
work, not in terms of doing nothing, because people who pretend to work with
ICT effectively have to learn how to use these tools, how to manage them, how to
set them and at the same time, selecting the appropriate material according to the
students level; and this, at the beginning, might be time consuming.
There is
another aspect to keep in mind when using blogs for language learning and
teaching processes, and that is the opportunity to teach students how to learn
to learn. In this concept, the teachers teach their students how to become
autonomous which in other words is the ability that allows students to make
choices that will definitely lead them to their own learning. Then students
become independent and are now capable of creating new learning strategies and to
look for their own material and resources. It is also possible to lead students
to develop social skills by working in collaboration with their pears.
