The web offers tools for projects, links, and communication, and also to send practical works. The students, happy.
Students open a blog, choose a template, post texts, upload photos, leave comments, add a visits counter, change background colours, etc... They start classes and after the first breaks, they handle those terms. With the beginning of the school year, teachers have a new challenge: how to exploit that energy, which is applied to the use of the Internet, for the benefit of the school curriculum. In order to achieve so, blogs are a valid alternative in classroom projects.
Among the schools that include technological tools in the syllabus of some subjects, we can mention ORT, with more than 140 blogs running from the two campuses. The Director of the Virtual Campus, Guillermo Lutzky, makes emphasis on the idea that blogs are useful for ‘communication and production’: "Some children upload their poems, instead of handing in a sheet of paper; or in the case of the Mass Media track, students upload videos. But there are also blogs to monitor students, and even a medical department blog for prevention. Some teachers use them as weblogs: two students take turns to register the class, the activities, the tasks and then post them for the rest".
In turn, the Geography teacher Eugenia Alonso from the Liceo N° 1 José Figueroa Alcorta María, says that the school has a blog where the information on the different activities (such as ceremonies, excursions, championships, celebrations of last year’s hundredth anniversary, etc.) is constantly updated. "Besides, I give students guides, links to search for information, and work proposals. At another blog, I include information on courses of study for 5th and 6th-year students, enrolment dates, scholarships, syllabuses, and different university sites", adds Alonso, who has been working with weblogs since 2005.
Teachers agree on the fact that students get hooked on blogs, which are useful to hand in practical works or as a means of communication in the classroom. "It is like a blackboard that accompanies us. It is a network tool, which is part of the future. Therefore, the idea is that children can produce works they can keep for them and which they can show", emphasizes Lutzky. “Above all - he explains- it is interesting to go and look for children in that virtual environment: students spend more time on line than with the TV”.
“Many times, teachers are afraid of using a new tool, which the student knows better, but that can be from the instrumental point of view because the one who knows about the subject is the teacher. And it is ok that the student can share what he/she knows with the teacher.", indicates Laura Rodriguez, from Programa Red, Department of Education of the City of Buenos Aires.
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