Principles of Formative Assessment

Blogs In Education # IEASC

Blogs are used in education to provide a place for students to share reflections and ideas. Teachers can take a social issue such as homelessness, and as the students are researching and learning about the issue, they post comments and respond to each other. Each student can have their own blog for journaling thoughts, and then students and teachers read the blogs and answer with follow up reflections. One question is, how do teachers assess student blogs? How do these translate into a quantitative grade? It’s possible to use a rubric: Blog journaling rubric. The rubric states the purpose of blog journaling, which is to reflect on class activities and learning rather than personal experience. This is another Blog journaling rubric.

 Blogging allows students to communicate with an outside audience, which helps them to fix grammar and raise the quality of their writing. It helps to have an arrangement where the class is paired with another class in a different location. Some blogs are designed to support learning a specific subject such as a foreign language or math. Some blogs are fully public, and others are accessible to a limited private audience. Teachers have to be mindful of student security, so full names are not used. Students may use an initial or a pseudonym. Ways that teachers can use blogs in the classroom include: post a prompt twice a week and ask students to respond by a certain day, or have students peer review the work of a classmate and give suggestions. The teacher can review the comments to approve them before posts are published to make sure the comments are appropriate. Other ideas: appoint a weekly blog team to report the class news for the week. Parents and students can respond to the news, or have students respond to a reading that they did, or make a claim with no supporting details and have students search out supporting details from reliable links and add them to the blog, post a link to a site and ask students to critique the site including bias and validity, post a link to current event and ask students to create commentary on how this affects their local community.

 How might blogging present specific challenges in the classroom? Teachers need to make sure that if students are publishing their writing to a wider audience, they need to meet criteria for effective and appropriate writing, students need to cite sources, read web materials using critical thinking skills, and how to use the comment tool. According to Michael Peters, the purpose of blogs is to connect with an audience. Not only is the writing published to an audience, the audience responds with comments. This develops a community. It is a good place for people to explore their identities and have a voice. Students can link media and other content that they have created. Blogging should not just consist of the teacher and student in a conversation. Minimally, it should include peers, and the conversation needs to continue inside the classroom.

Teachers need to establish norms and expectations for each activity, including: criteria for the product, how will the activity be assessed, norms for behavior including manners and ethical standards. It’s a good idea to include expectations for multimedia. Ideas for finding an audience include: families, Twitter and Facebook friends, PLN. It’s not a good idea to assume that a blog is private if it’s publicly accessible. Students and teachers should read blogs to see examples before actually publishing their own. Will Richardson describes how he uses blogs with his high school students to give them real life experience creating a useable tool to share with an authentic audience. The students created an online study guide for The Secret Life of Bees. Not only did the study guide have more than 2 million hits from other students, the author of the book, Sue Monk, came on board and added her own response to their work. Mr. Richardson set up a partnership between his students and students in other schools to facilitate collaboration.

The ISTE Standards for Students include Communication and Collaboration. In this Standard, students “use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.” Blogging also gives students practice in information fluency: “ Locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media.”

I am looking forward to using blogs with my students. We all need to practice our writing skills, especially in today’s world. Having the skills to communicate in a blog appropriately, following ethical standards, expressing meaningful ideas, responding to other people, and so on, is very important. There are many challenges facing teachers when they include blogging in our instructional plans.

Safety is my first concern. I need to make sure that the blogging is either within a safe network, or there are safeguards to protect student identities on public sites. In both cases, the blogging must be monitored by the teacher or designated responsible adults.

My second concern is to make sure that there is an actual community out in the blogosphere to blog with. The educators in charge need to do the footwork necessary to identify an appropriate match for students to communicate with. This isn’t easy for me, as evidenced by my own blog, which has few hits at this point. This will be a problem for me to solve for my students and for myself as I expand my blogging.

I’m collaborating with some educators to create a critical thinking curriculum for high school and college students. We want the participants to be truth seekers and to evaluate and weigh their options. We are expecting the participants to blog as they proceed through the courses. This will make the courses more interesting and help the students to reflect on their ideas, as well as challenge their thinking. For example, we have a mini-course on the topic of leadership. We want the students to understand what it takes to be a leader, choose a cause that has meaning to them, take a position of leadership and plan a course of action. This kind of learning is much more effective when a student has the opportunity to share ideas with peers and reach out to an authentic community who would benefit from their action plan. The students will need to practice the ISTE Standards of collaborating with a community, and contribute to the learning of others. They will have to evaluate the value of different causes, and practice critical thinking to make sure that they are making an informed choice, and make sure that their sources are legitimate.

Blogging has risks, because it is difficult or impossible to prevent people from using the freedom to hurt others. On the other hand, blogging provides the opportunity for people to make a positive contribution to make the world a better place. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this tool.

 References: 

"Blog Basics" from Teachers First.com retrieved on November 24, 2013
Dyck, Brenda “Log on to a Blog” Education World, accessed Nov. 22, 2013
Gilbert, Alorie, “Blogging 101- Weblogs Go to School” CNET News, Oct. 17, 2005
“ISTE Standards for Students”
Peters, Michael “Getting Classroom Blogging Right”-Tech in EDU posted Jan. 29, 2013
Richardson, Will, “New Jersey High School Learns the ABCs of Blogging”, The Journal, 06/01/2005, retrieved on 11/26/2013.

Creating my blog on Blogger

When I read that we would be required to create a new blog in Blogger, my first reaction was to find a way to use one of my existing blogs for the assignment. I already had a blog that I created and developed as the culminating task for the IEASC core classes. I used WordPress for my blog, bought a theme, hired a consultant to help me set it up, and started posting several months ago. My resplearning blog is attractive and

After reading the posts of other students in this elective, I realized that creating a new blog on Blogger would be great experience. In any case, it was a requirement of the course, so I went ahead and experimented with Blogger. Initially, I started one and tried a few themes. I tried to embed my Pinterest board on the new blog. It didn’t work. I really wanted to do this, since my Pinterest board had current archived resources that I wanted to share with my audience. I googled the topic, and found directions for how to embed Pinterest boards on Blogger. I followed the directions, and modified the HTML on the blog. Unfortunately, it corrupted the whole blog. Now none of the gadgets worked. I hadn’t added any content yet, so I created a second blog.

I made an appointment with my website consultant on Tuesday to ask for his help. I needed to ask ask him to teach me how to manage my blogs. I wanted to add some interesting visuals to my blog. I posted my favorite blog from YouTube, and for the second posting, I added a ToonDoo comic that I created.

This blog is on its way. I hope SOMEONE reads it :).

Project Based Learning and Blogging for Sharing Meaning and Purpose

By mrsdvorakravitz | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

In his Nov. 26, 2013 blog entry, Will Richardson addresses the direction we are going in social networking. Mr. Richardson quotes Kakul Srivastava, where Ms. Srivastava says that corporations as we know them need to change. In her opinion, social networks need to be more than just our immediate contacts. They include people we don’t know very well. It would be useful if we could share meaning, purpose, and fun with these contacts. This could lead to increased contact with people who share the same meaning and purpose for business and livelihood. Richardson states that while we use our PLNs currently to connect and share ideas, it's likely that in the near future we will be leveraging our online contacts as an extension of our workplace, to do our jobs. This is similar to Project Based Learning. When the students engage in PBL, they explore a problem, create a solution, and test the solution.

I’m wondering what steps I can take to make sure that my students have an audience. From the readings we had, I see that teachers make connections and plan the audience. That makes a lot of sense. Since PBL is supposed to have an authentic audience, this provides students with work experience interacting with a customer who needs their problem solving and solutions. While I explore my direction and possible application for my skills as an educator, I also realize how important it is to have an audience. I haven’t succeeded in accessing an audience yet. I created a website, and added blog entries and resources, including teacher tools and access to my lessons that I teach face to face. I decided to create an online journal tracking my journey as an educator. I posted two parts so far, but I have a long way to go to reach an audience. In the meantime, the preparation of a public blog is a great way to clarify my own direction and communicate to myself and others my purpose and meaning as an educator. The next step is to connect with other people who have similar meaning and purpose. 

References: 

1. Boyd, Stowe, “The New Visionaries: Kakul Srivastava”, Gigaom Research: http://research.gigaom.com/2013/11/the-new-visionaries-kakul-srivastava/ 
2. Richardson, Will, From PLNs to PGSDWOPNs, Nov. 26, 2013 at: http://willrichardson.com/

What Does The Doctor Mean to You? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

I'm posting this video because I believe that this series is a great example of an engaging, provocative, and entertaining blog. I think I've been following Mike's blog on YouTube for over 6 months. I enjoy his energy, the surprising connections that he makes between pop culture, Science, philosophy, his own point of view, and more. His topics strike home for me because I hear about pop culture around me, and I also care about ideas. Mike also includes summaries of emails that he receives from each previous blog. He reads a few lines and makes a quick comment. I've recommended this blog to many people. Even if I don't have the resources or the same politics as Mike, I still appreciate it.