When we first started using the blog for this course, I didn’t really see what use it could be for my classes at school. I had heard of using wikis, and was excited about learning to use them, but had not heard of using blogs for the classroom. After blogging for a couple of weeks about this course and after reading “Create a Classroom Blog” by Brunsell and Horejsi, I have seen firsthand how a blog may be useful to my students. Since I have no computer access in my room, and no computer time is available for high school students except the yearbook staff, any blogging my students will do will have to be as homework assignments. We are fortunate in our school in that most, if not all, of the students do have high speed access at home. The biggest hurdle seems to be convincing parents that the online space is safe.
The article about blogs had quite a few great ideas for their use in the classroom. One comment that jumped out at me was “Science education blogs can serve as powerful digital lab notebooks that contain text, images, and videos.” That sounds pretty cool. I thought that to give lab a new twist, I could put a team of two or three students in charge of posting each lab report online. They could use video they took during lab, pictures, and post their data and conclusions. After this team posts their report, other students in the class could make comments and suggestions for making the report better. I seem to always have a hard time getting the freshman biology students to understand what a conclusion is, so maybe critiquing others’ work would give some positive reinforcement. This project would be “in process” throughout the semester, hopefully training each student to write an excellent lab report. Another plus for this method is that I would have a record of the labs we did and the progress that was made. I would need to remove these posts before the next class started – is that possible?
According to the article, the blog could also be used for online assignments and comments. That is what I would like to develop for my final project, so I guess a blog would work. I am still puzzled as to whether a wiki or blog would be best- so, back to explore some more to hopefully find the answer!
If you used something like a course management system like Edmodo, or perhaps it can be done on a wiki, you can put students in groups so that they can't access another groups information. I think blogs and wikis really serve different purposes so it kind of depends on what you want to do. I'm thinking of using blogs as e-portfolios for my final project, so a bit of a similar idea?
ReplyDeleteI posted this on your Edmodo post, but wasn't sure how often you check your comments:
ReplyDeleteI just figured out how to get into another group. After you log in to Edmodo, go to the left hand side of the page, where it lists your groups. Where it says "join", click. It will come up with a popup where you can enter the code for whatever group you want to join. It's all starting to make sense now!
I'm working on something similar for my project- a virtual science fair. Using a wiki to brainstorm and share resources, then edmodo or a blog to post glosters detailing the results of their projects. I like the idea of being able "see" students interacting with each other not onlybat the beginning and middle of their projects but after too- through leaving comments.
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