Tuesday, 26 March 2013

Blogging as an Educational Tool


At first I found it hard to identify areas in which blogging would be useful in the teaching of secondary science.  There is a lot of declarative knowledge to be taught in secondary science.  And blogs didn’t really appear to provide a particularly good platform for teaching this sort of knowledge.  To use a blog with correct technological pedagogy, it needs to provide more than just presenting the same information from a textbook on a new media.

One of the potential uses of blogs, as suggested by Stephen Downes (2004), is as a class web page.  This could initially provide information such as class assignments, rules and homework.  For science, I could envisage a blog site containing a plethora of additional educational tools.  As the term progresses the teacher can provide additional online links to help with learning by placing these in a blog relating to each topic, week or class.  There are many online science tools that a teacher could embed into the blog but may not have time to cover during the formal lesson.  This way the students can review the additional material when convenient and easily return to the appropriate blog when needed.  Many of the sources used during a class could also be linked or embedded onto this type of blog.  Gone are the days when the only information that a student can take from a lesson is what they remember or manage to write down in notes.  A blog could provide the one-stop shop needed by a student to access to all the information relevant to their studies.

It could be argued that this online class-related information could also be posted on a website, and it can be.  However, as Downes (2004) argues, blogs tend to be easier and quicker for the user to modify or add content, and allows for students to leave comments or questions relating to a particular posting.  Also, it can be hard to identify when new information has been added to a webpage.  Whereas, a blog easily allows each student to identify when new information has been added, as each post is dated and displayed in reverse-chronological order.  The student simply needs to scroll down the page until they find the last posting they read.  All new postings will be displayed after this (or above it).  Postings within a blog can also have relevant “tags” attached to them, allowing the students to search for a particular or similar posting.

A more student-centred approach to blogs would be to get students to post their own work on a personal blog (Downes, 2004).  This could include homework, assignments or lab reports.  Anything that might be used to reinforce the new concepts could also be posted, e.g. drawing a concept map, construction an event sequence, answering homework questions.  However, blogs by their nature are for sharing information and ideas between people, so this would only be appropriate for tasks where it was appropriate for ideas to be shared amongst the students.  Assessment tasks in which the content needs to be the students own work are probably not suited for posting on a blog.  There are options available for teachers to be able to restrict who sees a blog (Downes, 2004).  So, it would be possible for a teacher to only allow themselves to see each student’s blog, however another form of technology would probably be better suited to these types of assessment e.g. submission of files via email or an online school website. 

Blogs lend themselves to reflective writing.  This is a good way to support constructivist learning (Fasso, 2013).  A reflective activity that could be undertaken would be to get students to blog after each lesson.  In their blog they would have to include at least one thing that they understood and one thing they didn’t understand.  Then each student needs to read their fellow students’ blogs and see if they can help anyone else with their questions by posting comments on each other’s blogs.  This would give all students an equal opportunity to reflect on their most recent class, voice their opinion and learn from each other.

One of the criticisms of students blogging raised by Downes (2004), is that the student might only be writing for the teacher.  However this statement could be made of many other forms of writing and assessment pieces, including the traditional essay.  And so, is not a new issue or solely linked to student blogging.

Another issue that arises from using blogs is whether or not the blog should be an ‘open’ blog (i.e. able to be viewed publicly on the internet) or a ‘restricted’ blog (i.e. protected by a password and only able to be accessed by students, teachers and parents).  According to the National Copyright Unit (n.d.), the answer to this can be quite complicated as it depends on the type of information being posted and what its copyright restrictions are.  Basically, if the blogs are only going to contain the students’ own work or free for education material, then it can be open.  But if third party material protected by copyright will be used (covered by fair dealing), then it needs to be protected.  These rules will also vary according to each school’s own web publishing guidelines, whether or not personal student information is being published, student could be identified by the information and what sort of parental consent has been given (Education Queensland, 2012).  This can create quite a headache for the teacher.  It might be difficult for the teacher to predict what sort of material the students will be using.  To be safe, it would be easier to simply restrict access to the blog, something that is recommended by Education Queensland (2012), especially if there is the potential for personal information to be included through which a student may be identified.  But then this removes the global element that becomes possible when people from all over the world are able to comment on a student’s blog. 

As can been seen, the use of blogs in education contains many benefits as well as hazards.  However, I believe that through proper planning and monitoring, blogging can be a beneficial educational tool with very little negatives.

References

Downes, S. (2004). Educational Blogging. EDUCause Reviewi, 39(5). Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/educational-blogging

Education Queensland (2012).  Web publishing for schools – Risk management.  Retrieved from http://education.qld.gov.au/web/schools/riskman.html

Fasso, W. (2013). A brief overview of learning theory. Retrieved from CQUniversity e-courses, EDED20491: ICTs for Learning Design, http://moodle.cqu.edu.au

National Copyright Unit .(n.d.). What can a teacher do on a wiki or a blog? Retrieved from http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/cache/offonce/pid/946/ctnscroll_guidelinesContainer/1_1

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