Carnation Education

Carnation Education

As education evolves and starts to embrace rapid developments in technology, we’re starting to see new teaching methods being introduced to the classroom that take advantage of this digital revolution.

One form of digital communication being increasingly exploited for learning purposes is blogging. If students are to write about a subject on a public platform like a blog, they need to be completely familiar with the subject and comfortable expressing an opinion about it. This encourages a deeper understanding and greater engagement with the subject. Unlike when they write an essay that only the teacher will read, blogging gives their work an indefinite life beyond the classroom and invites others to engage with it.

here are several possible ways of utilizing the power of blogging in a classroom context. These are the main ones:

•  Teacher communications – using a blog to communicate school or class news with students.
•   Teacher blogging about their subject – to encourage debate among students (perhaps even encouraging students to engage actively with the content by leaving comments with their opinions).
• Student blogging – either a shared blog to which each student can contribute under their own user profile, or each student has their course for sharing their thoughts about a particular subject or subjects.

Now that you are excited about introducing blogging into your own classroom, here are some ways you can incorporate blogging into your lesson plans and assignments.

Create a research log. Have students record their research process in their blog. Ask them to reflect on their sources and where they found them, create research memos, ask questions, and share exciting results. Writing a log in a public place means that they can share their research challenges and successes with fellow students and readers beyond the classroom, situating their research in a broader network.

Create an image blog. Have students create a blog where all they post are images. What arguments can they make solely through images? What emotions can they convey? Ask students to think about the relationship between images and content—what can they learn about history, or biology, or advertising, through images?

Create a question blog. Have students post questions to the readings or their research. You could assign one student per week to look up answers and present them to the class, or bring up the questions in class. You could out-source the question to academics beyond the classroom, or partner with another section of your class and have one group ask questions and another group answer. This is a great way to expand the discussion beyond your classroom, and is supported by microblogging sites like Twitter.

Create a class blog run by students. Have students create a single blog that all of them contribute to. This can be related to class content, where students post and respond to questions about the readings, or it can be a place where students practice principles and ideas they have learned throughout the semester as a group.

Create a blog assessment memo. Have students take screen shots of their blog throughout the semester, and ask them to reflect on what they learned at the end. What kinds of writing did they do? How did it help them engage course content? What did they like? What didn’t they like? How often did they connect with other students? With people outside the classroom? Ask students to think meta-cognitively about the work they have done throughout the semester, with a written record that supports their evolution of thought. Facebook is a place for students to create a static report alongside their ongoing blog.