Why I blog with students
Nancy is planning to talk to a group of teachers on Saturday about blogging. She asked this favor:
One thing I want to talk about is why we blog with our classes. I would greatly appreciate it if you could leave me a brief comment here telling me why you blog with your students.
I love reading the various responses. Here’s mine (unfortunately, not brief, but I got carried away as I started listing some of my why’s). I could have added more.
Why I blog with students
Weblogs are unique spaces that we can use with students to make writing THE focus. We can publish quickly. We can set up an audience for them. We can give them ownership of their work in ways we cannot in our solitary classrooms. Students can get to practice writing through a diverse array of writing experiences. It’s a way we can make writing a joy for them and let our students know and feel that their writing matters. We have to set the stage and encourage the dialogue in our classroom that leads them toward understanding the power of the written word. I want our students to be a part of the conversations we have about education. It is a great way to reassess our teaching and re-examine student learning. It is also a good way to give our students a voice. We can listen and learn from them.
Another thing is that it lets us have the opportunity to truly integrate technology into instruction and build a community of powerful learning for our students. Weblogs can engage students in a purposeful practice of writing that can promote deeper learning.
Blogging can foster classroom conversations that matter. My having a weblog shows them that I make writing a priority. My having a blog lets me share my writing and learning with my students who have blogs. We’re in this together and we learn with and from each other. I use it as a tool in the classroom to ensure that the students and I are talking, reading and writing about how and what we are learning and thinking. We interact through comments. We have others outside our classroom enter the conversations. We work at building a community who respect and encourage each other. We learn to disagree agreeably. We write to learn. We blog to learn.
Be sure to add your reasons. It’s becoming a powerful list!
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:46 am
I’ve used Blogs now with two groups of MSc students on an MSc in elearning Technologies. (http://www.port.ac.uk/courses/coursetypes/postgraduate/MScE-LearningTechnologies/)
To give a bit of background - they’d used a private discussion board (student + tutor only) as a learning journal in WebCT in their first year. For the first semester of the second year, they were encouraged to keep a blog; this time to be a learning journal that the rest of the group could read as well. The first time that we used it, the students were positive, over half continued in the second semester, when they had the option of blog or private discussion board.
In the second year the students were much less positive. They’ve more or less all gone back to
private discussion boards.
A couple of them pointed out that they didn’t like the fact that no-one commented on their blog (other than me), but they were also reluctant to comment on their peers - it seemed as if no-one was willing to make the first move, despite encouragement.
We’re starting a new MSc next year, and I’m keen to have them using blogs from the start - will have to see what impact that has on them.
By the way, like the new interface!
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:50 am
LOL! I forgot to answer your question “why”. One of the aspects of the particular unit that they take in the semester we get them to blog is “Community building”. They are already used to using discussion boards & chat sessions (it’s a distance learning course), and so we wanted to introduce new things. Keeping a blog seemed the best way of getting them to start learning about them.