Abstract:

Students all over the world have today access to the world wide web and thus many things are competing for their attention. As our students’ world changes, so too must the methods by which we teach and engage our students (Lara T., 2005; García-Manzano A., 2006). In this article, we propose one way that teaching can be significantly enhanced by using one of these web services, the blogs. One of the primary reasons for the rapid adoption of blogs is that they are quick to setup and easy to use, requiring absolutely no programming knowledge or HTML skills (Gallego-Torres A., 2006). Presenting that basic and supplementary content of a course in a blog, the information can be constantly updated in the same way as the materials used in the classroom, and they are available any time in the blog. Thus the documents, notes, presentations, images, videos, and comments in the blog offer the following advantages:
1. Make learning independent of time and place
2. Synthesize, disseminate and update the contents of the course that is taught.
3. Encourage communication between teacher and students through comments and participation.
4. It’s possible to know the interest of students on certain issues.
5. The analysis and discussion of certain subjects not covered in the syllabus.
6. Use the tools of Web 2.0 for spreading: collection of data, projects and papers of interest. It is also possible to access specialized, certified and updated information complementary to that reviewed in the classroom.
7. Use strategies and cutting-edge electronic tools for teaching.
This paper describes the potential of a blog as a tool for curriculum innovation in the context of a university course. It describes an experimental implementation of this tool in the subject of Genetics in the Biology major at the Faculty of Sciences, UNAM. The results indicate the contributions of this tool to the improvement of the quality of the teaching-learning process.

Keywords:

Blog, teaching resource, Genetics.