blogging as an effectve learning tool

Blogging is an effective learning tool that is not utilized in many classroom settings. I have had personal experience learning from writing educational blogs. It is a different way of learning but I think it has many benefits that are overlooked often by educators. Having students look up the topics that their professor asked them to look up causes the student to learn by doing their own research. This works better then you might think. I remember blog topics that my professor asked me to write on over two years ago. It is great strategy for retaining information. In normal classrooms you sit and listen to a lecture, which is boring to most unless you are really interested and truly want to learn the material. Now this is not to say that blogging doesn’t have its disadvantages because it does. In my experience blogging is good for the big picture ideas. It falls short when you need to go into detail on topics or when you need to learn information for a test like the MCAT. However in my opinion its shortcomings are nothing compared to the benefits. Blogging makes learning fun, not boring. I would really like to see more teachers applying blogging into the classrooms. I think they would see students do better in the class and participate more in classroom discussions. Blogging also creates a better environment for learning. No longer do students have to stress out about exams because the students already have a better retention rate as compared to students who don’t use blogging. Stress is a killer that can cause diseases like heart disease, which is the number one killer of people in the United States. Stress is an unhealthy and unnecessary byproduct of popular education methods and blogging is the answer to this dilemma.