Instructional Blogging Techniques & Tactics
If you teach using the Web and are looking for new ways to promote student discussion and feedback, blogs may be the ticket. This Web-based tool will allow you to connect your students to their classroom experience and to the real world, while developing a sense of community and easily shared information.
Blogs? What's that, again? Perhaps the best-known use of a blog is as a personal journal on the Web intended to be read by the public. Blogs are easy to use and enable people who know nothing about creating Web pages and writing computer code to publish to the Web.
Blogs: "A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The word blog can also be used as a verb, meaning adding an entry to a blog." Wikipedia
Make It Fit Your Pedagogy
Instructional blogging works best when directly related to a specific pedagogy. Students quickly lose interest and do not use instructor-created blogs when there is no direct assignment or reason to use the blogs. Assessment data indicates students want to know others are reading their entries.
Encourage Participation
Ways to engage students to write on course blogs range from developing assignments written on a course blog to requiring comment on other students' entries. One way to realize this successfully is to specify in the syllabus that students are expected to make two or three comments to other student entries and that these comments should expand on the collective knowledge. There is a risk that unless students have guidelines on appropriate ways to comment, they will drop short statements that contribute little.
Instructors and professors who comment on student blogs, particularly the first few weeks of a semester, may find better student contributions as the semester progresses.
Brand the Blog to Your Department
We can customize blogs hosted by the Learning Technology Center by adding a banner to the blog homepage that features the department or college. This brands the blog for that academic unit. These banners range from simple text images, to images including a department's logo or to attractive banner images created by a blog's author.
Example of customized banner
Adapting Instructional Blogging to Large Classes
Teaching a Gen Ed course with as many as 200 students? If your Gen Ed course has honors students in the course who must do an honors project, have them do it on a blog and ask the rest of the students to comment on the honor's students' entries.
Blogging Without Active Professorial Direction
If a professor is not actively engaged in class blogging, we have found that blogging will work better if the blogs are maintained by a small percentage of the class selected by the professor. Some students will accept ownership of blogs, some will comment and others will only lurk.
Blogging as Part of a Simulation Exercise
Blogging works particularly well as one component of an online simulation in which blogs represent media outlets that are the basic public sphere of a game environment. The need to know what is going on in the game and the need to publicize and spread propaganda make the blogs more than just a place for exchanging opinions.
Addressing Course Issues
Blogs can be an effective way to address class issues outside of the classroom and use class meeting time to focus more closely on more complex issues. An effective way to do this is by keeping a "professor's blog."
On a course Web site, a professor includes a statement about his "professor's blog" that anyone else is welcome to adapt.
"I am maintaining a blog for this course as well. The sorts of things I expect to write about include: additional thoughts that relate to class material, thoughts I have that may delve more deeply into a particular topic, perhaps some recent experiences I have had that illustrate how IT is being used, and something interesting that I read."
Another use of maintaining a professor's blog is to model good blogging behavior. Because students are asked to contribute blog entries that further knowledge of the subject material, adding them to the professor's blog is a useful way to show students what an appropriate entry looks like.
Learn more about instructional blogging, how blogs are being used at the UA or to request a consultation — visit Stuart Glogoff's instructional blogging Web page at elearn.arizona.edu/stuartg/instructionalblogging.html. To request an instructional blog — ltc.arizona.edu/blog.cfm
RSS Feed: