Most universities press their faculty to add technology to their classroom by adopting the Learning Management System—Blackboard, Moodle, etc. This is a mistake. Faculty often end up spending hours learning the system and loading the same content that they use in the classroom, and finish wondering if the benefit was worth the effort.
I instead encourage faculty to start by adding a blog to their class. A blog can be set up in minutes and is easy to learn and maintain. Plus, there are a variety of studies proving that blogging can improve educational outcomes. For instance:
- Faculty at the University of Maryland Baltimore County found that when they switched chemistry labs from individual students doing experiments and submitting their results, to groups of students posting their findings to a blog and receiving feedback from other students, the average passing rate in class went from 71.2 percent to 85.6 percent, even as the minimum score needed to pass went up. Read more about the UMBC experience here ».
- David Wiley at Brigham Young University had his students post their written work to a blog before handing it in. The students received comments from other students and even faculty at other institutions, which improved their work greatly. Wiley found that dozens of other people were effectively doing his job for him by providing students with commentary to improve their work. It multiplied student outcomes without extra effort on his part. Read more about the experience here » .
One of the benefits of blogging is that it is public, and we are more attentive to the quality of our work when it is public than if it is just viewed by one other person. Plus, blogging creates a person-centered discussion, as opposed to the topic-centered discussion of the LMS. Students are less invested in LMS discussions and often lend the minimum commentary necessary fulfill the requirement. But students become much more invested in their work when blogging, and thus are more engaged with the material.
Also, Kris Kelly notes that blogging encourages higher levels of reasoning because the “focus is not necessarily on the content of the blog, but more on the process of constructing and evaluating knowledge helping us reach the sometimes elusive upper levels – analyzing, evaluating, and creating – of Bloom’s Taxonomy” (http://tinyurl.com/mtj6kf).
One simple way to incorporate blogging into nearly any course is to create a single class blog and post case studies, news items, or topics for commentary. Another option is to assign students to post notes on each class along with their thoughts on the material, and assign other students to comment on the postings.
Add blogging to your classes with any of the free platforms below:
Blogger – Google’s publishing tool: http://www.blogger.com
Tumblr – A feature rich system: http://www.tumblr.com
Posterious – Super simple, and with lots of functionality: http://posterous.com
Soup.io – Another powerful product from the “io” people: http://www.soup.io
Edmodo – Good for making password protected groups of blogs: http://www.edmodo.com
Share your ideas: I would love to hear ideas for using blogs in the classroom. Please share your experiences or ideas by posting a comment to this article in the space below.
John Orlando, PhD, is the Program Director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.
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I worked for two years in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, where I taught a seminar course on Globalisation and National Security. Many of the students in my class were from countries that did have any tradition of seminar based teaching: they were used to getting and parroting the lectures of their professors. As such, generating discussion was extremely difficult and I had to lean hard on Western students and those who had done courses in the West. I decided to employ a wiki/blog to get my students to post what they had read and what they had thought about the readings prior to class. The effect this had was that it permitted me to see, ahead of class, what everyone had read (or not read), and what sorts of questions were in their mind. This let me start asking pointed questions to even the quietest members of the class from the very start. By the end of the course, we had created as raucous a seminar as any in a Canadian or American university.
The students in my Advanced Drawing for Animation class post their weekly sketchbook work on individual blogs, which are linked to our classroom LMS. In this way, they can look over each other's shoulders, trade ideas, and generally inspire each other. They are encouraged to post three times a week and a part of their weekly grade is contingent on timely posting. Since this is a practicum class, this approach guarantees that they will conduct regular daily practice, not just do their homework the night before class. The usual outcome of this is a dramatic improvement in skills by the end of the term.
Critique and grading are also facilitated by this practice because the instructor has the luxury of time beyond the arbitrary confines of the class meeting time to review and consider the work. A spot-check of student sketchbooks during class-lab insures that the work is legitimately constructed and not the product of digital "short-cutting."
I wish I had started teaching online in this way. It would have been much easier and improvement in student learning would have shown up right away. After over 8 years of using Blackboard and feeling trapped, I am now ready to integrate real blogging into my classroom. The start up time and learning curve is steep using LMS. The grunt work is enormous. The biggest change is pedagogical, as well. I think when online teachers start with blogging they will get the pedagogical shift necessary to make LMS work more effectively.
Now with the iPad, people will be able to bring others around their computers for a real and virtual world experience, making learning with technology virtually and real world inclusive. Amazing. Steve Jobs is a genius.
Check out the USA Today article on how groups of individuals are gathering around the iPad and sharing technology together. They can learn together using the iPad. This combines the real world group learning experience with the virtual world learning experience. This is the transformation we have been waiting for.
Dr. Diane C. Gregory
http://www.onlinelearningcafe.com
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Paul:
I like your method of asking for comments on the reading before class. Did each individual student have a blog, or did you create one for the class that each student had access to?
John
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I would also add that http://wordpress.com provides a free 3GB account for creating one or more blog sites. I prefer to create my postings within MS Word 2007 and publish directly from there. That way I can take advantage of the image formatting (borders, dropshadows, image skew/tilt, etc.) in Word. I've also found that I can blog easily, on the go, by either creating an mp3 audio from my smartphone and then using the "publish via email" function to send it to my blog site. *Wordpress is also testing out a "publish via phone call" function that works great. You call, enter a unique identifier key and start talking. When you're through, hang up, and the audio blog is created with a simple Javascript audio player embedded in your posting.
WordPress.com has an automatic mobile theme, which recognizes smart devices and formats your content for delivery on them. So, not only can you & your students be blogging "out in the real world," but you can be viewing or listening to content while "on the go."
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I think it is a wonderful idea to make a blog for the classroom. The students' are so interested in technology I think this will be a great way to keep their interest and open up communication between students, peers, teachers, and the public. This is the first blog I have ever responded to, and I have really enjoyed reading other peoples' opinions about how to improve student learning.
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When the technology boost happened in classrooms, I was fortunate enough to be in a school which embraced making technology readily available. Whilst we were quick to add as many apps as we could, have catch up sessions in the early hours of the morning to share what each teacher had found, I quickly realised that making technology relevant was more important now than ever before. I agree with the idea that teachers can spend endless hours learning how to use sites available, spend all their time uploading their work in the end, wonder if it was worth it. Technology is supposed to be saving us time, but instead, we are totally time poor. Blogging is exactly how we can enrich learning and engage students further, making planning specific and relevant while including technology.
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Educational evolution is really neat. From pen and paper, book to blogs and ebooks. Blogging by itself can teach students to think, research, logically reason and prove their topic. Of course there will be some that will just write for the sake of just writing or blogging, but there will be something good that will happen as time goes by. Students right now are well exposed to digital tools and with that, they have a huge edge in this digital age.