New Media and Mass Communication www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-3267 (Paper) ISSN 2224-3275 (Online) Vol.29, 2014 37 Attitude and Usage of Blog as a Determinant to Pre-Service Teachers’ Academic Achievement Christopher T. OMOTUNDE 1 Kayode O. FAGUN 2 Shadrach O. ADERELE 1 James A. Abidoye 1 1.Department of Educational Technology, Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo, Nigeria 2.Department of Teacher Education, University of Ibadan, Nigeria Abstract Blogs are popular form of easy-to-use personal publishing that has attracted millions of bloggers to share their personal thoughts, opinions, and knowledge on the web. The versatility of blogs as a communication medium has attracted interests from educators. Blog service offered to learners and teachers through Internet is an important instrument to provide learners with effective activities and social interaction. Blog technology provides the users with opportunities to create web pages without any design knowledge, write their ideas on these pages, and add comments on the pages. This paper investigates the attitude and use of blog by pre-service teachers as a determinant of their academic performance. The result shows a significant relationship between pre-service teachers’ academic performance and the usage of blog. It is therefore pertinent that educator begins to introduce blogging to their classroom activities. Keywords: Blog, Academic Performance, Attitude, Pre-Service Teachers. I. INTRODUCTION The use of information Communication technology (ICT) is no strange to the average Nigerian child. The issue is how much of ICT is utilized in Nigerian learning institutions. The world is experiencing a wave of social and technological transformation as the society is becoming more oriented to the usage of ICT. Today, we live in a society in which instantaneous worldwide communication through electronic media (internet, computer etc.) have become common. The pervasiveness of these technological devices in our lives, however, tends to obliterate the developing countries. These Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have blurred the boundaries of our personal worlds. People, though living as citizens of a single nation are now culturally, materially, psychologically and especially, engage with the lives of people in other countries as never before (Gana and Osuji, 2005). Over the past years, the rapid changes of information and communication technologies have brought the innovations in communication and information sharing. These innovations have contributed to further enhance the teaching and learning process in higher education. Time and space problems have been eliminated through these changes and communication, interaction and information sharing between individuals have also become easier. Education has been experiencing an increased interest in using Internet and Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools. While ICT has been widely used in distance and online mode of education, its being increasingly used along the face-to-face lectures to augment and support classroom learning, the use of online discussion forum has emerged as a common tool and effective way of engaging students outside the classroom (Balaji and Chakrabarti 2010). These rapid advances in ICT have brought about activities that serve as a replacement for face-to-face instruction (e.g. virtual course) or as an enhancement of the face-to-face learning experience (i.e. online learning activities that are part of a course given face-to-face). Online learning, web based learning or e-learning according to Khan (1997) is an innovative approach of delivering classroom instruction to a remote audience, using the web as the medium. Ascough (2002) opined that online instruction has the following features: • It provides a learning experience different than in the traditional classroom because learners are different. • The communication is via computer and world wide web • Participation in classroom by learners are different • The social dynamics of the learning environment is changed and discrimination and prejudice is minimized. Several more applications are being developed to increase the flexibility of web technology. These applications (Web 2.0) are been adapted into teaching and learning to support asynchronous and synchronous communication, carry multimedia elements and are easy to use (Abimbade , 2011). This Web 2.0 applications has however, opened up new learning possibilities for educational programs and blog is a promising example of these new applications. Blog was proclaimed “word of the year” in 2004 by Meriam-Webster online dictionary. A blog, short for “weblog”, is a web site in which items are posted on a regular basis and usually displayed in reverse