In the next two weeks, my Pre-AP students will begin reading the novel, "Life as We Knew It". I am very excited to begin as the students have enjoyed it in past years. Each week students will read selected chapters in the book and answer the guided questions assigned. Before I start the novel, I usually take time out of the class period to go over some of the background information for the novel. Then we may take some time out on Friday's to discuss what was read during the week. Looking at the blog idea, I am trying to determine how I might use it to discuss important issues in the novel during the week that will not take time out of my class time.
While looking on the internet for some diagrams of Bloom's, I noticed these two on a website called Visual Blooms. The top with the typical pyramid visual shows the levels and different technology that may be used. The bottom visual shows how each type of technology may be used on more than one level. I felt that was truly accurate since I thought of several levels a blog would address.
As we begin our novel, I would like to use the blog on my school web page to ask a question, and then let students add their answers. Each week I would post a question that would allow them to analyze or even synthesize using information from their prior knowledge and the novel. They would be collaborating with one another in the blog. This supports Ryan and Cooper (1998) who advised teachers to serve as a facilitator in the learning environment when considering true technology integration. The idea is that students will retain more information when they take ownership of their learning.
The content addressed each week will vary depending on the chapters read. On some occasions, it will address environment and climate while other times it will be human body systems and how they interact together as a whole.
The affordances of using a blog is that students know what to do when they begin typing. Blogs are designed to share information and if the right site is found, it will be easy to navigate and manage. Today's cell phone technology and social network's are well known and used. Most of my student's have both and use them on a regular basis. Texting is essentially the same as using a blog, only they use text lingo to communicate on their phones. In blogs, I would limit their answers to complete thoughts and sentences. I would also monitor the information so that inappropriate posts would be removed. Thus allowing them to have ownership in the blog, while moving them to towards being responsible for the information they provide.
Blogs are interesting teaching tools. While at the Mini-CAST conference yesterday, one of the sessions was on "flipping the classroom". The idea is that we take the lower level learning, ie. knowledge and comprehension, and move it to outside the classroom with short videos that explain and give definitions for the new concepts. We then use activities in class that allow students to explore the concepts learned. I think a blog would be one way to give the information to my students outside the classroom. If they did not do the "homework" reading, they would struggle to understand the activities and discussion in class. I would know they did not do the reading, and hopefully they would take care of their homework next time.
While I see a lot of uses in the classroom, there are some drawbacks also. Some blog sites are public and thus allow for students to navigate to inappropriate sites. Parents may not like the idea of their child posting information on a public site. As was stated in the Mishra and Koehler video, they will have a tendency to post "I agree..." instead of giving their own original opinion. All of these drawbacks are avoidable with the proper guidelines and privacy controls. With our school web page, the blog is only accessible by my students through password protection. This would allay any fears parents and myself may have for posting on a public website. Setting up guidelines for student participation with grading parameters, will also alleviate some of the issues that come up with students posting responses on the blog. If done correctly, a blog would be a powerful tool in educating our children.
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