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Blogs

Blogs or blogging has become a big hit over the last few years with some of the biggest blogs having massive followings. How can the rants of some disenchanted internet user help me teach I hear you say; well, there are a massive number of blogs out there and many of them are specifically related to psychology and teaching psychology. Here I am going to break blogs up into two sections: what you can achieve through writing a blog for your students; and what you could gain from reading others blogs or encouraging your students to read and research others blogs.

Writing
Blogging software is becoming more advanced with each new day and now it is very simple to create a website solely using software designed for a blog. There are really an infinite number of uses for blogs within the education field: writing and collating new and relevant news for your students, giving students a summary of what was covered in that past week, leaving homework assignments, and many others which don’t come to mind at the time of writing. Not only can you write your blog posts but students, other teachers and colleagues can comment on what you have said and start discussions about what was raised; again this could lead to other implementations of blog software.

There are many kinds of blogging software but the two most popular ones are WordPress and google’s Blogger. Both of these sites allow you to set up your own blog online and post articles or general musings through a web-based interface allowing access wherever you have the Internet. If used well blogs can provide to be a central part of teaching and independent learning, however, general rules of web etiquette still apply and all users need to be aware of this. For a good overview of blogging best practices see here.

Reading
Blogs aren’t just something that you have to write to make use of them as a teacher; there are hundreds if not thousands of psychology related blogs out there, some useful, some not-so-useful, and reading these can give you and your students a great idea of what’s going on in psychology at the moment. You could use a search engine such as technorati to search for articles or blogs of interest. When you have found them rather than having to return to the website to see any new ‘breaking’ stories you could use the RSS feed and a news-reader of which there are many.

Don’t forget when you get one of these RSS readers working to add our RSS Feed so that you can keep up with what’s going on here at PsychBlog.co.uk. If you’re also looking for other general psychology related blogs to read there are a few n my blogroll on the navigation panel.