Why Blog as an Occupational Therapy Student?

10 reasons why you should blog as an occupational therapy student!

1. Connecting with the wider allied health community. Including reading expert blogs, consumer blogs and reading community group discussion regarding various mental health interventions.
2. Keeping Updated with Flexibility- getting questions answered in real time by experts in the field which helped guide your clinical reasoning. For example, I try my best to respond to clinician questions that come my way regarding BPD and their clients.
3. Sharing of resources, knowledge, opinions
4. Becoming a self-directed learner: Blogging can be a way to express and affirm your identity as an occupational therapist.
   Develop your critical analysis thinking skills
5. Developing your communication and confidence: For me, I struggle to verbalise my knowledge at times. But with my blogs, I use them as my mental database. I am much more confident and quicker in retrieving and articulating information that I have discussed on my blog.
   6. Set learning objectives and goals for yourself. What is it that you want your blog to achieve.
   7. Self-reflection: be vulnerable, share your weaknesses, and be authentic
   8. Try not to over think it. The best blogs I have written have been the pieces I have just let the words come out.
   9. Find your passion and purpose! Write about things you love and not for the purpose of making extra money.
   10. Keep persistent: It took about 6 months for OT for BPD to get off the ground. I had so many ideas. So many drafts of blogs. But once I defined by objectives and goals and took that step of courage, I went from a couple of readers to posts that can reach 25,000 reads. All of which I value so much!
   
   
   Key Principles
   – Be passionate and compassionate.
   – Boundaries: Both personal and other’s confidentiality.
   – Set ground rules and disclosures around what services you do and do not provide.
   – Nothing replaces 1:1 supervision
   – Decide if you want your blog to be open to others OR are their restrictions on who can access what you write
   – Find other avenues to vent… unless it serves a greater purpose.
   
   
   References
   Image:
   https://pcdnetwork.org/resources/guide-to-blogging-for-peace-and-social-change/
   Garrity, M. K., Jones, K., Vanderzwan, K. J., de La Rocha, A. B., & Epstein, I. (2014). Integrative review of blogging: implications for nursing education. The Journal of nursing education, 53(7), 395. doi:10.3928/01484834-20140620-01