Examining Instructional Blogging Efforts and Lessons Learned.

Guest Post by Elaine Hirsch.

As instructional blogging made its way into classrooms, student feedback has helped teachers structure methods to use blogs effectively, from elementary classrooms to online PhD programs. A mix of positive and negative feedback has helped illustrate how blogs are useful and how instructors can identify and improve upon challenges that might arise with their usage.

In his article, “Instructional Blogging: Promoting Interactivity, Student-Centered Learning, and Peer Input,” Stuart Glogoff relays student feedback after the use of instructional blogs in one of his classes. One student reported that reading about new subjects via the blogging format was enjoyable; she found that researching the topics to post on the class blog was helpful to her overall learning experience. The student, however, complained that, “the posts were few and far between.” She expressed further disappointment over the fact that none of her posts received comments, a complaint echoed amongst other students who took the survey

In order to make instructional blogging more effective, Glogoff gave blogging assignments that required each student to post entries and comment a certain number of times on the work of others. Afterward, students reported general increases in their sense of community. They also reported greater satisfaction with the overall blogging experience. Others said the entire blogging and peer-reviewing process not only helped them understand the course material but also provided a better avenue for helping each other learn through conversation.

Dr. John Freed, a professor at Brandman University, assigned students in his Communications 372 class the task of creating individual blogs accessible to all other participating students. Along with Dr. Freed, each student in the class subscribed to his or her classmates’ blogs. The class shared its ideas and participated in online discussions via the individual blogs. Students learned how to document and present their accomplishments, work electronically, and instantly place their achievements within a global context. In their end-of-term evaluations students reported the blogs did help them accomplish their course objectives.

According to Dr. Freed, many of his students expressed appreciation that the blogs not only helped them learn the class materials in a new way, but also they liked that the blogs made class materials more readily accessible. Some reported the blogs facilitated learning from one another, and helped them learn new electronic media skills that could be applied in other settings. The only negative feedback he received was from students previously inexperienced with blogging and who therefore had problems learning to navigate the interface, causing them to fall behind on their work.

In a study conducted by Michele D. Dickey of Miami University students who had participated in instructional blogging assignments reported a lessening sense of social isolation and an increase in social camaraderie. One student reported her interactions via blogging with other students in the class instilled the idea that she was part of a community composed of her classmates.

In the same study, one student revealed mixed feelings about assigned blogging. She reported feeling that the friendliness that took place during blog discussions wasn’t genuine. She also reported a sense of cronyism: other members of the blogging group had become exclusive friends and ignored her posts. As a result, she didn’t feel her attempts to start conversations were successful. She also expressed that the sense of community often expressed in the postings didn’t fairly represent the actual class, but instead represented the group dynamics of the online community.

Using blogging as an online educational workspace can expand the realm of learning beyond the physical constraints of the classroom. For many students, it provides a whole new method of learning. The crucial element for instructors is to listen carefully to how students express their experiences and to draw on this information to improve instructional blog use for future classes.

Guest writer Elaine Hirsch is kind of a jack-of-all-interests, from education and history to medicine and videogames. This makes it difficult to choose just one life path, so she is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites and writing about all these things instead.

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3 Quick Lesson Plan Ideas That Utilize Technology

Letting students use technology to create presentations, reports, journals, etc., can be an easy way to introduce technology in a lesson plan or project.

Guest Post by Rebecca Garland

If you’ve been teaching longer than a few years, you already know that it can be tricky to be a “perfect” teacher all the time. While we might play the part of perfect when it comes times for evaluations and such, most of the time we tend to fall back on what we know – which usually isn’t the latest and greatest technology.

Unfortunately the lack of planning time and huge amounts of expectations in the classroom create a challenge when it comes time to work in some technology-based lessons. In many cases, there just isn’t time to learn about the sites or figure out how to use them – no matter how great they looked in the thirty minute meeting you had with the technology specialist last week.

Rather than just blowing off improving technology in the classroom, you should look for ways to use it more simply. The key to this is to let the students create with technology – it’s far less time-consuming for the teacher than having to create a lot of content yourself. Here are a few quick lessons that have a great technology tie-in that shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to plan or organize.

GoAnimate.com – It’s an animation website (wait, don’t panic!) that your students can use to create their own short movies. All you have to do is send students to the website on the library or computer lab computers. Have them set up their own free accounts and explain that there are very limited choices for free accounts when it comes to customization of characters, but they are creative enough to work around that.

Once they are signed in, they should create an animation in one of the available “worlds” to perhaps summarize a book or short story, deliver a speech they have written, teach a lesson on a particular topic or introduce themselves or their ideas to the class. It’s a great way to present student work without having to force students to the front of the room.

Voki.com – Another great, simple website that students can jump right into. Voki creates talking, somewhat animated avatars. Have students write poetry or speeches and then create a Voki to actually read the message aloud. Or make a final deliverable for a formal paper a bit more interesting by having a Voki that the student has created read it aloud to you.

Both Voki and GoAnimate are “cutesy”, but often letting students play with a website gets them much more engaged in what you’re asking them to do. Rather than just the typical ‘write a summary of the article’, tell students to create a Voki to describe it instead. It uses the same principle of summarizing and picking out main points, but it also lets students dabble in the sorts of things that make learning ‘fun’ to the digital mind.

Blogger.com – If your students have access to Blogger, have them use the blogs instead of a journal to outline ideas or create products for your assignments. Since the blogs are visible to the world, you might assign pen names (that you would know, of course) if your students are underage – and be sure to get permission ahead of time. Stress to students that having published work means it must be mindful of the audience and cautious at the same time.

Let the students write journal entries, address prompts you’ve set up, or summarize chapters of the text or novel you’re working on in class. One idea that is a bit more involved and “out of the box” is to have students set up the blog as if they are the main character in a novel or perhaps even a scientific element or historical figure. They must stay “in character” throughout the blog posts and post a minimum number of times exploring concepts, ideas and plot points through their posts. You would need only to go to their posts to view the blogs when the assignment is finished to create a grade. You could even have fun leaving comments for your students to have them respond with deeper thoughts on the posts – much like a more traditional reading response journal.

[Click here to open a brief video tutorial showing how easy it is to get started blogging with Blogger.]

 
Have you used these, or similar tools, to create lesson plans that incorporate technology? Do you have any experiences to share that can help others? Please comment and share your insights, ideas, or questions! Thanks - KW

Rebecca Garland is a freelance education writer specializing in creating materials to inform, educate and entertain readers. She represents a Minneapolis technical school online as well as creating materials other secondary teachers might be able to use in the classroom to improve student engagement and foster deeper learning.

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Survey Results – Professional Development Is Top Education Technology Wish List Item

This week Edublogs kicked off it’s “Teacher Challenge” Professional Development project …

The first 30 Day Challenge from Teacher Challenge is “Kick Start Your Blogging”. This challenge includes activities for beginners and more advanced bloggers, so it can help both educators interested in getting started with blogging and those wishing to expand on existing blogging activities. There are 11 Activities scoped out for the challenge, and in addition to the beginner and advanced topics, there is also a discussion forum for each activity, where participants can share, reflect, and learn from each other.

Edublogs is a highly popular blogging site for educators, and it is a great way to get started with blogging. I did my own ‘How To’ tutorial on getting started blogging with Edublogs last year, and that video is embedded towards the bottom of this post. Another hugely popular free, easy-to-use blogging platform for bloggers of all types is Blogger. I also have a tutorial on getting started blogging with Blogger, which I’ve embedded below.

Starting A Blog Using Blogger

Starting A Blog On Edublogs

This is certainly great way to challenge yourself if you’re at all interest in blogging, and to expand on your professional skills in a way that can have many applications in the educational setting. Upcoming Professional Development Challenges from Teacher Challenge will include topics such as Personal Learning Networks, ensuring student safety on the web, and increased parental involvement.

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And the 2010 Edublog Awards nominations are …

In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., I would like to nominate the following blogs for 2010 Edublog Awards. I am grateful for the fine work that everyone involved in these blogs (and so many more like them) does, and I think that they are wonderful examples of their respective blogging categories:

Best Classroom Blog
Huzzah!
http://huzzah.edublogs.org/

Best Individual Blog:
dangerously!irrelevant
http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/

Best Student Blog:
Portable Radio
http://portableradio.edublogs.org/ 

I came across each of these great sites while writing the series “Blogging In Education Today” over this last summer and remain impressed with them. Great blogs like these are the reason that the education-oriented blogosphere continues to grow and grow, and in many ways, the reason EmergingEdTech exists! (If you aren’t already blogging, click here to learn how to start your own blog on Edublogs or Blogger.)

Nominations for the Edublog Awards (now in their 7th year) wrap up December 3rd, and voting starts shortly thereafter and will end on December 14th.

Good writing skills are critical for today’s students, here’s a few online tools to help develop and reinforce them.

As teachers, I think we’d all agree that communication is pretty important. In fact, it’s a necessary component of education, livelihood, and basic functionality in our society. It’s also fairly obvious that there are two main ways to communicate, although more obscure forms exist. Basically, we talk and we write. That’s how we let other people know what’s going on, and it’s an important skill to have. Just about every student can talk, but how many can truly write well?

Why Students Need to Write Well
Writing is not for turning out cookie-cutter essays in AP Lit & Comp. It’s not for texting friends, keeping diaries, or even for getting a better SAT score. Writing is important because it’s used extensively in higher education and in the workplace. If students don’t know how to express themselves in writing, they won’t be able to communicate well with professors, employers, peers, or just about anyone else.

Much of professional communication is done in writing: proposals, memos, reports, applications, preliminary interviews, e-mails, and more are part of the daily life of a college student or successful graduate. Even if students manage to learn the material in their college classes without knowing how to write well, they won’t be able to express their knowledge to the people who are making the big decisions. Potential employers won’t know whether or not head knowledge can be applied to everyday demands unless it’s through a spoken interview. Even the majority of certifications and licensures require basic writing skills to obtain. The inability to write makes for a stillborn career.

Introducing Online Writing Tools
There are several different ways to help develop students’ writing skills, but implementing online tools is one of the best choices. This is due to many students’ inherent interest in all things technological – a lot of students have a fascination with any new tool that can simplify a basic task (like writing). If you’re interested in using online tools to help your students with their writing, the following list contains some useful ideas and websites.

Blogging: Let’s start with something simple: give your students a blog. You can have each student start his or her own page, or you can assign pairs, groups, or an entire classroom to one blog. This isn’t a fancy tool that will do part of the writing legwork for your students, but it’s a huge motivator and it’s fun. You might consider assigning blog topics, or you can have students research and propose their own “blog identities” before they start to write. The more you can get them invested in the idea of blogging, the more they’ll learn from the experience. Click here to learn more about getting started with free student blogging.

ReadWriteThink’s “Student Interactives”: Head over to this page at readwritethink.org for the handy Webbing Tool, Notetaker, Printing Press, and more. Many of the “Student Interactives” like these are useful, and they’re also indexed by grade level appropriateness. These types of tools can be a great interactive way to gain useful writing skills.

Model Bank: Introduce your students to Model Bank, a website with interactive versions of successful writing in common middle school and high school formats. For example, students can find a sample of a good poem analysis with notes in the margins and a printable “Writer’s Guide” to help implement the successful parts of the sample. The concept of “leading by example” does have merit in writing, and Model Bank is a great way to accomplish that.

These are just a few of the many types of free writing related tools and resources available on the web. Do you know of some other tools like this? Please comment and share!

Guest writer Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching areas of online colleges and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

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I’ve got some great stuff to share in today’s mid-week post - EmergingEdTech’s new video blog, and a nice interview feature on Udemy.com!

Today I am officially launching a nice addition to EmergingEdTech’s growing set of web based education technology resources - a companion video blog over on YouTube.

Interview on Udemy
Before introducing the new vlog with a quick video and looking at the first video blog post, let me take a moment to thank Udemy.com for this nice little interview we did, which they posted today. Udemy is a great website that enables anyone to create an online course (stop by and check it out!). In the interview we discuss the genesis of EmergingEdTech, and I answer a few questions about today’s evolving education technology.

The new video blog!
I’m pretty excited about this - each week I’ll supplement the feature post with a video blog post, in which I’ll discuss that post and, since it’s a video format, I can look at the topics discussed in a different way. This provides readers an opportunity to be viewers if they wish, and for anyone to consume EmergingEdTech content in a new, fun way.

Here’s the first video blog post … which discusses this week’s feature post, “5 Easy Steps For Students To Establish Their Personal Brand Using Social Networking“, but looks at these tips from the perspective of how all professionals can benefit from the use of social networking in a professional context.

I hope the new video blog interests you, and that you’ll stop by, and subscribe!

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It’s really easy to get started blogging – here’s two different ways to get up and running with a quality blog site quickly.

With the start of the new school year many teachers, administrators, and students will be thinking about finally starting that blog they’ve been considering. I promised in last week’s final post in my “Blogging in Education Today” series that I would write a post about how to get started, and here it is.

Below I provide a little information about two of the major players in the educational blogosphere. Following these introductions, I’ve provided a couple brief video tutorials that show you how to get started with either one of these blogging applications.

Edublogs.org

One easy way to get started is with Edublogs. They’ve been around since 2005, and the site provides only education related blogs. Given that focus, they offer some unique functionality for educators and students. For example, Edublogs permits no adult content in their blogs and they don’t faciliate exposure to blogs other than the one you are specifically looking at (whereas other popular blogging sites provide buttons and links that encourage you to click through to other blogs they host).

Edublogs is the premier site for education related blogging, and the site’s features and functionality are constantly evolving. See the video “Starting A Blog On Edublogs” below for an overview of how you go about getting started with your own Edublogs blog.

Blogger.com

Blogger is the original blogging platform, started by three friends in 1999, and purchased by Google in 2002. By default, blogs created on blogger get a ‘blogspot.com’ url. You can also have Blogger blogs hosted on your own custom domain name (note that you would have to purchase a domain name in order to do this).

Blogger has many features, and as a Google application, it integrated nicely with many other Google apps. You can also monetize Blogger blogs with Google AdSense ads. Blogger is a good alternative to Edublogs if you are looking for a different level of functionality, and the ability to grow your blog over time into a custom site with more advanced capabilties.

See the video “Starting A Blog Using Blogger” below for a tutorial on getting started with Blogger.com.

Watch this video to learn how to start your own blog on Edublogs:

Watch this video to start your own blog using Blogger:

I hope this post and these videos encourage you to get started blogging today. As you can see, it really is quick, easy, and free. There are many resources available all across the web that will help you learn more about this. Of course, if anyone has any questions, feel free to submit them (comment below, or use the Contact form). Happy Blogging everyone! 

Next
Next week’s feature post is a great article providing “5 easy steps for students to establish their personal brand using social networking” by guest poster Angelita Williams. I hope you’ll stop by and learn with us.

Since most schools here is the U.S. and many abroad are starting a new term this week, here’s wishing everyone an enjoyable and productive first week of the new school year!

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Blogging in Education Today (Part 5 – Education Technology Blogs)

This week we wrap our series, in which we’ve been learning about many of the ways in which blogs are being used in today’s educational institutions.

As promised last week, this final post in our series will examine blogging that focuses on education technology, as practiced by education and instructional technologists and educators in general.   

First, a brief recap of the types of educational blogging we’ve already examined in this series. We started by looking at teachers blogging on their own, then followed with ’classroom blogging‘,  moved on to individual student blogging, and this bought us to last week when we looked at examples of blogging by educational administrators.   

Like the above types of blogging, the use of blogs to share experiences and insights into various education technnologies has been growing steadily since the late 90′s and early 00′s. An Internet search for “education technology blogs” or similarly worded phrases will deliver hundreds of relevant results. With their high level of technological prowess, it shouldn’t be surprising that there a good number of these types of bloggers who have created very popular, highly trafficked web sites.   

Here’s some examples of Ed Tech blogs. I’ve provided a mix of blogs from both teachers and technologists, since these two types of professionals are the source of the majority of education technology blogging.

Ideas and Thoughts: As noted on his site’s About page, Dean Shareski is a Digital Learning Consultant with the Prairie South School Division in Moose Jaw, SK, Canada, who specializes in the use of technology in the classroom, and holds a Masters of Education in Communications and Technology through the University of Saskatchewan. This blog’s tagline (hard to read in the image below) is, “relevant, engaging, authentic learning”.

FreeTech4Teachers: Teacher Richard Byrne publishes this highly popular site, where he provides “Free Resources and Lesson Plans for Teaching With Technology”. One of my favorite things about his posts is that he makes a point of providing some “Applications for Education” with each post.

Transparent Learning: Bethany Smith is an Instructional Technologist working in Raleigh, North Carolina, and actually has a few blogs. I wanted to include “Transparent Learning” as an example here because it is a nice sort of typical example, in the best sense. Bethany shares her experiences with, and ideas about, education and technology in thoughtful posts, with no predetermined frequency. This sort of free form but meaningful blogging is in many ways the essence of what a ‘binary log‘ is intended to be.

Dangerously!Irrelevant: “Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University. He also is the Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), the nation’s only center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators”. He produces a good deal of content, on this site and elsewhere. Scott was also one of the minds behind the well known “Did You Know? (Shift Happens)” YouTube videos.

I think this is a great set of examples of current education technology blogging. Of course, I’d be somewhat remiss if I didn’t point out that the blog you are reading right now is certainly a qualified example of education technology blogging as well!

Next
As a kind of logical addendum to this series, I’ll be publishing a post that discusses a few easy ways for educators or students to get started with blogging.   

I think the five categories that we’ve covered are the main sources of blogging in education today, but there are surely other types of blogging going on out there in the educational blogosphere. Feel free to comment and mention any other blogs or types of blogging that you would like to bring to light. Thanks!

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Blogging in Education Today (part 4 – Administrator’s Blogs)

This next phase in our series examining how blogs are being used in education today looks at how school administrators are using them.

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking at current examples of blogging in an educational setting. We’ve looked at teachers blogging individually and in the classroom context, then we looked at student blogs. This week we’ll look at some examples of how school administrators are utilizing blogs to communicate with their consistituents.

School Presidents and Principals and other administrators have been blogging for years, and the practice continues to grow. Following are four examples of these types of blogs.

Sweet Briar College’s President’s Blog - Sweet Briar College is located in the state of Virgina in the United States. On her blog, President Jo Ellen Parker shares college happenings and thoughts on such varied topics as: insights into the incoming class of 2014, mixed emotions about college rankings like Forbe’s and Princeton Review, and fond wishes for a retiring college employee.

South College’s President’s Blog – This small college is located in the US state of Tennessee. College President Stephen A. South’s recent posts include “Helping HUG promotes teamwork“, about their Admissions Department’s work with the Knoxville Habitat for Humanity Urban Garden (HUG) Foundation; and this post about the keynote address delivered at their 2010 commencement.

Burlington H.S. Principal’s Blog - Principal Patrick Larkin of Burlington High School in Massachusetts (in the U.S.) maintains an active web presence, and this blog is a part of that. In this post, he offers a half dozen online Web 2.0 resources he learned about in a recent meeting with other Massachusetts educators. In another post, he informs readers that student schedules have been mailed out and provides a link to the school’s Summer 2010 Newsletter.

Harvard Business Schools’s Admissions and Financial Aid Blog - Presidents and Principals are not the only school administrators who are blogging these days. This blog is from HBS’s Admissions Director, and she discusses things like Visiting HBS, a profile on the Class of 2012, and launching the 2013 Application Season (the individual posts don’t have their own URL, so I couldn’t link to them here).

These example blogs provide a great introduction and overview of some of the ways in which administrators in today’s educational institutions are using blogs to communicate and share information.

(By the way, obviously all of these blogs are from admins in schools in the US – I am sure that administrators in other countries are also blogging, but the search results I came up with only contained US schools – of course, this may be influenced by the fact that I am searching from here in the US. I don’t mean to provide an unbalanced view, but US schools totally dominated the search results, even when I added in names of various other countries in my search).

Next
The next part in our series will focus on another member of the educational community that frequently decides to get into blogging - the education/instructional technologist.

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Continuing our multi-part series on the use of blogs in education today, we look at various examples of Student blogging efforts.

Over the last two weeks we’ve looked at various ways in which today’s teachers are using blogs. This week we continue our review of the educational blogoshpere by looking at different ways in which students are using blogs in education-oriented applications.      

There are various reasons why students blog in an educational context. Some examples include blogging as part of a classroom effort involving other students, blogging on their own simply because they enjoy it, and blogging as part of a “sharing the experience” blog on a college web site.

As with the last two week’s posts, I believe that one of the best ways to provide insight into these types of blogs is to take a look at a handful of ‘live’ examples. 

Student Blogging Examples   

Portable Radio - This is a great student blogging effort focused around podcasting. The students working on this blog change from year to year. The last academic year’s work leveraged the efforts of 56 5th grade students, from two different elementray schools in Ottawa, Canada. I applaud the educators behind this ongoing effort – Mrs. Smith of South March Public School and Mr. Toft of A. Lorne Cassidy Elementary School.      

Jazzing Up Eight Grade - Eighth grader Abbey blogs about “School, Piano, and Everything In Between”. Abbey loves reading mystery novels, playing piano, she loves math (“I love the perfect, you’re either right or wrong, way math is.” – me too!) and much more. I love her blog.  

 Jess - “Hello, I’m Jess. I am 14 and live in Australia, Tasmania. I Like school, as weird as that may sound. Right now my favourite subjects are English and science..” Jess blogged here regularly in 2009 as “a school thing”, but hasn’t kept up with it since then. When she was blogging regularly, this was a nice example of a student expressing herself and sharing and learning through this medium.

CW Blog - Here we have an example of student’s blogging about their college experiences. Deirdre Aldana and Michael Adebiyi share their thoughts and observations as they work their way through life as students at The College of Westchester in White Plains, NY. These types of student blogs are widely used by colleges and universities and even some K-12 institutions, as a way to provide potential students some perspective they can easily relate to.
  

So there we have 4 great examples of different ways in which today’s students are using blogs to express themselves, share their experiences, and develop their writing skills.  

Next
Next week we move on to Administrator’s blogs. College and university presidents, school principles, and other administrators, have been using blogs for years to convey information about their institutions, and to share their thoughts about various aspects of today’s educational landscape. We’ll review a handful of worthy examples of this type of education related blogging in this next part in our series – please stop back and join us!

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