Using Blogs in the Classroom

My summer school class starts tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to using a blog in class for the first time. For the first day, it’s set up with attachments of the Word documents for the class syllabus and vocabulary words, and I will be adding other documents as the students need them.

This is the first time our school has had a blog. It is completely internal—accessible only to computers on the district’s server. This means, of course, that the students cannot write for an outside audience, but they can still write for each other. One thing I am going to try is having an online discussion of our novel, with students leading the discussion by creating thought questions. Each day a different student will be the discussion leader. It will be his or her responsibility to post a brief summary of the previous day’s reading, along with two questions to promote higher-order thinking from Bloom's Taxonomy. I have already posted an example for the first day’s reading. Since the novel we are reading, Montana 1948, is not extensively used in classes, there is probably not a complete student guide, so I will compile the students’ work into a brief guide, as Richardson’s students did (2009), although ours will need to be a print rather than online format for the present. (However, there is an online guide of questions related to the story, so I will provide a link to that. It may give them ideas for the questions they post.)

Since this is all new, our tech department and I don’t know for sure yet if we can create individual blogs for each student. If we can, I will also have the students create portfolios from their blogs. I plan to have them write a reflection on their learning as their post, and then include the document as an attachment. Richardson (2009) agrees with this approach. We can even include artwork because a scanner is available, and the blog software does allow us to upload pictures.

I’m really excited to get started. Ideas and suggestions are more than welcome.

References:

Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Who Serves Whom?

Today’s communication technology opens new doors for education, but it also poses new questions. Which technologies will serve us best? Should students have access to blogs and wikis? Should we invest in interactive whiteboards and projectors?

One educational technology leader posed a completely different but very intriguing question on his blogs this week: Should technology support education, or should education support technology? On his blog from July 6, Will Richardson quotes Ira Socol, who asked, “So, it is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?” (2009). (By the way, Richardson was referring to responses to Dean Shareski's blog--also good reading.)

The real point of education has long been to create citizens who can contribute to society—citizens who are informed, thoughtful, concerned, adaptable. Education does not exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the society it serves. However, the same is true of technology. And because of technology, today that “society” is the whole world. As Dr. Thornburg notes in the video “Technology and Society,” communication technology is shrinking the globe, allowing access to global peer groups, any time, anywhere (Laureate Education, 2008).

Since both education and technology exist to serve humanity, neither can claim top priority. So, should technology support education, or should education support technology? Yes.

References:

Richardson, W. (2009, July 3) “Digital Inclusion.” Message posted to Weblogg-ed, archived at http://weblogg-ed.com/.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2008). Program 2, “Technology and Society.” Understanding the impact of technology on education, work, and society. Baltimore: Author.