Integrating blogs in teacher education

This chapter demonstrates some of the educational merits of blogs; including how blogs can be integrated in teacher education and proposing a methodology for evaluating blogs to meet the goals of reflection and technology literacy in teacher education. An undergraduate-level course was integrated with blog technology to help readers better understand the inquiry-oriented nature of the blog medium. This exemplar course modeled Web 2.0 technology to teacher educators and pre-service teachers who intend to integrate the technology into their future teaching. Surveys and interviews were used to investigate participant attitude toward blogs. The researcher proposes Zeichner and Liston's (1987) Reflective Index as a potential framework for evaluating the quality of reflection in blogs. It is expected that this instructional model of blogs will help educators, in particular teacher educators and instructional designers, to design courses to more effectively meet the goals of higher-order thinking required in 21^st century teacher education.