Reflective Count on Leveraging the Affordances of Weblog to Harness the Benefits of Newspaper in Education: The How and Why

This paper draws upon the author’s own practice in leveraging the educational affordances of weblogs to harness the benefits of ‘Newspaper in Education’ (NIE). As such, this paper describes the ‘how to’ and ‘why’ deliver NIE through weblog. The “how to” accounts researcher’s proposed method in channelling NIE to a group of 1 st year pre-service teachers enrolled in a BEd TESL program in Teacher Education Institute in JOHOR. Two fields of thoughts were used as the guiding framework. The first adhered to the notion that pre-service teachers must first be given opportunities to use technologies in their learning in teacher education programs in order for them to practice the use of similar technologies in the classroom. The second was drawn from the theoretical rationale that online communication impacts literacy learning. The second part of this documentation takes a look into ‘the why’ perspective. This includes the pedagogical affordances that weblog holds to advance the benefits of NIE. As e-paper is emerging with impact, these reflective counts recommends for teachers to go paperless while still incorporating newspaper in classroom. At the receiving end, pre-service teachers demonstrated competency in utilizing the full potential of weblog to improve both their spoken and written English and indicated that this experience simultaneously prepared them to become better practitioners of technology in the classroom. Govindasamy, M.K. & Muniandy, B. (2012). Reflective Count on Leveraging the Affordances of Weblog to Harness the Benefits of Newspaper in Education: The How and Why. Malaysian Journal of Educational Technology, 12(2), pp. 25-32. Newspaper in Education “Newspaper in Education” or NIE is a program internationally conceptualized to promote student’s literacy by using the newspaper as a teaching resource. Generally, NIE proposes for the use of daily news, editorials, advertisements, cartoons and others as featured in the newspaper for the learning of educational concepts while improving reading and comprehension skills. In Malaysia, NIE, in championing the Education Ministry’s goal to improve English language teaching and learning, found its way into English lessons in Malaysian schools in the mid of eighties with mainstream press companies providing copies of their prints directly into student’s hands. Currently, almost all schools in Malaysia run this program as evidences on the potentials of newspapers as learning resources are huge. With curriculum guides, nationwide workshops and tours by NIE teams, this program saw dramatic growth. Over the years, the use of newspapers as dynamic textbooks and learning supplements has been extended and incorporated into nearly all classroom subjects. Schools are offered newspapers at a special education rate and with this NIE program has flourished. Taking a deeper dive into NIE in Malaysia, this program works towards enhancing creativity in both spoken and written English. By analysing the news and media, students are expected to think, write, speak and express fluently in English. NIE aspires to produce students who are able to practice critical thinking, excel in problem solving and stand out as leaders. News on current events and issues as flashed by the print media are used to help inculcate these qualities in them. NIE’s activities have taken many forms. Fundamentally, all activities are channelled towards building students’ proficiency and confidence in the target language as well as prepare them with higher order thinking skills. While workshops are conducted periodically by the NIE teams, during regular classroom sessions, teachers use articles from the newspaper for reading and for classroom discussions. Beginning with the very basic recall capacity, students are assessed on various learning domains based on Bloom’s Taxanomy. As this scenario prevails in the physical classroom per se, how teachers can take NIE to virtual dimension without losing its essence and simultaneously develop a student community which is socially intelligent and fairly fluent in both