Wikis+Blogs+and+Podcasts

=**What are the benefits to blogging, podcasting and wikis in school?**=

Whilst [|blogging], [|podcasting] and [|wikis] all differ in their digital form, they all provide excellent educational mediums to assist learning and improve 21st Century skills.

Pupils love the interaction with technology, the pure enjoyment increases engagement and information retention. Adopting this sort of technology in the classroom makes school relevant to their world.
 * Enjoyment and Engagement**

Wikis, blogs and podcasts allow pupil's to actually contribute not just consume information thereby moving them from low-order thinking to a more desirable high-order learning. The World is your audience** When a pupil's audience increases from one teacher to the World, it gives their work a sense of meaning and value thereby:
 * Consumers to Contributors**
 * Generating enthusiasm and increasing motivation to produce more accurate, better quality work
 * Provides a requirement to communicate accurately and responsibly
 * Increasing the liklihood that the pupil will retain the information they have posted.
 * Allowing a useful method of gaining feedback and often encouragement from a variety of sources

Wikis blogs and podcasts present an opportunity for better collaboration between:
 * Collaboration**
 * School to parent
 * School to school
 * Class to class
 * Pupil to pupil

The very process of creating blogs, wikis or podcasts provides a very useful journal of the work completed thus allowing pupils to look back, refer to, and recall the work they have been involved in. The nature of the information is also important, in contrast to many text books the work is certainly more personalised, often more colourful, but it also has the advantage of being able to incorporate audio and digital media which adapts to the pupils [|learning style]. Further to this it is more 'portable' (through any internet connection) and searchable.
 * Revision notes**

Ewan McIntosh provides a very useful post on [|Why would a student or class want to blog?]