Since the middle of the 20th century, science and technology have unleashed profound changes in all areas of society. Social, economic, and political changes spread at great speed, thanks, among other factors, to the birth of the Internet in 1966 and its rapid development to become a space to host information. Blogs are easy-to-create tools that do not require very specific knowledge to use; however, like any other tool, the result of its use depends, to a great extent, on the methodology and the objectives with which it is introduced into the blog, the educational program, and therefore, the original activity that is proposed will be accompanied by the appropriate framework for its introduction into the classroom resources. The choice of the students of the last year of compulsory secondary in Spain for the field study has not been something casual. Creating and maintaining a blog requires text production and information processing skills that are not always available in the first years of CSE, especially if it has to be done in a foreign language.
Top1. Introduction
Since the middle of the 20th century, science and technology have unleashed profound changes in all areas of society. Social, economic, and political changes have taken place at great speed thanks, among other factors, to the birth of the Internet and to its rapid development in order to become not only a space to host information but also to create, maintain and update it.
Education has not been immune to these changes. Students now have a wide variety of information sources at their disposal and their number increases every year: the Internet, laptops, iPod, iPad, mp3, MP4... Most of the students are expert users of all of them, which makes available educators a wide range of new resources (Hew & Cheung, 2013).
For this reason, this work will delve into the use of one of the multiple tools that the Internet makes available to teachers: the blog. According to Ifinedo (2014), blogs are easy-to-create tools that do not require very specific knowledge to use, however, like any other tool, the result of its use depends, to a great extent, on the methodology and the objectives with which it is introduced. Therefore, the quality of a blog design becomes the main factor in order to determine the success or failure of an educational blog.
Blogs may be excellent educational tools and they give students complete freedom to publish content on the web. Blog writing is informal, unlike academic writing, which may be intimidating to some of our students. Blog writing takes the pressure off of writing and gives students a voice in a safe environment (Nepomuceno, 2011).
Teachers can use blogs to publish assignments, resources, and keep students and even parents up to date on class events, due dates, and content being covered. Teachers can also use blogs to help students’ master content and improve their writing skills. On the other hand, students can use blogs to publish their writing and educate others on a given topic (Crook, 2012).
The choice of the students of the last year of Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE) for the field study has not been something casual. Creating and maintaining a blog requires text production and information processing skills that are not always available in the first years of CSE, especially if it has to be done in a foreign language.
Throughout this work, an attempt will be made to carry out a bibliographical study on the application of web tools in Secondary Education, to carry out a field study to determine the knowledge that a group of students have about blogs and how they would accept their use in the classroom, and to propose an original activity based on the previous points.
The specific objectives pursued with this study will to define the most important concepts that will be used throughout this study, to develop theoretically the key issues related to the use of blogs in education, to carry out a brief survey of a group of 4th grade students to determine their level of knowledge of the blog and how they would accept its use in the English classroom, and to draw some conclusions regarding the field study and the original proposal, assessing whether the initial objectives have been met or not.