Blogging has also made its way into education. Many teachers now use this tool as a way to publish their daily lesson and add resources for extension or remediation. This keeps the communication between teachers and parents constant. Most blogs incorporate a variety of links, pictures, and other resources along with expository writing to relay a message to its intended audience. Unlike traditional websites, blogs entice readers by inviting them to respond to the writing and creating a sense of community among the bloggers.
The use of blogs enhances teaching because it not only links teachers to their students, parents, and community, but it creates a world wide network of teachers who can come together,interact, and collaboratively create lessons. Never before has it been possible to network instantly, which gives us limitless opportunities to connect our students to real world events in our curriculum. In a blog post by Ben Rimes, he discusses the opportunities that blogs provide us with in the classroom and advocates that it can change the face of what we are doing in our classrooms. Tools like the hash tag and RSS Feeds can allow students to keep track of current events as they arise. This not only revolutionizes, but simplifies the way we create standards based lessons. Once you find an anchor event or article to be the primary focus of the lesson, it is only a matter of adding supplemental materials to perfect the learning experience for students.
Blogs also help create an environmentally friendly classroom by creating an easy way to keep track of student work and transform a teacher's practice. Will Richardson gives a number of benefits of using Weblogs in the classroom including, "Students never misplace their work....having all of their work organized in one place...a Weblog can be shared with others who might be interested in or invested in the student's progress"(Richardson, 2010,22). With this paperless classroom model, new rules for literacy apply and teachers have to begin emphasizing the importance of being a good digital citizen with students. This includes, but is not limited to talking about how to thoughtfully peer edit or review your classmates work. It also make students think as the grader of an assignment, allowing them to look at their assignments from a completely different perspective.
This year I have been testing out blogs as portfolios with a fraction of my students, and I have seen a transformation in their work ethic. The students are a lot more invested into this blog than other activities because it is their own. Currently, I having students compose an entry about each skill we learn in our Language Arts class. This week we will be learning about simple, compound, and complex sentences. Throughout the week, students will be assigned to create an informational web page about the sentences. They may incorporate YouTube videos, pictures, and other links. My students find this to be an exciting new journey, and they forget they are really reteaching themselves the content that we have learned in class.
Students also have a sense of pride in their blogs which drives the work they publish on them. My students know their family and friends will be checking their blogs so they make sure that their work is their best. Konrad Glogowoski indicates that blogs can be a powerful thing because students tend to be more motivated by peer comments than teacher comments. However, students also are more focused on quantity of responses and views rather than quality. This could have serious consequences in our adolescent society that is ruled by how many followers you have on Instagram. As a teacher, it is crucial that we emphasize the importance of quality to our students, and teach them to focus on comments that help them improve the content they are publishing.
Blogs are just another example of how education is changing rapidly. We must keep up with the demands that will drive our students' lives once they are thrust into the world. It will not be long before technology infiltrates every content area in some way on a daily basis. Schools are continuously investing in new technologies to help their students achieve excellence. Regardless of a teacher's background, they must connect technology into their lessons to add an engaging element to the potential cumbersome standards.
With the implementation of blogging comes the question of assessment. If we dedicate a large portion of our time to having students create blogs, how we will grade them and what kind of grade will it be (formative, summative)? An easy, effective way to grade blogs is by using a rubric. I love rubrics because I have a co-teacher who shares some of the grading responsibility in my classroom. When we use a rubric, we know exactly what we are looking for in the student's work.
Since I am doing a blog portfolio in my classroom this semester, I am especially interested to learn from other teachers who have assessed this way in the past. I looked at a variety of rubrics and even looked at argument to assess or not assess student's work on their blogs. Ultimately, I decided that my blogs would be better served as a portfolio grade rather than nothing at all. Grades motivate students, and without any real consequence, why would the put their best effort forth on their blog? However, within the formal assessment that I complete, I think it is important that student self-assess along the way. Finally, upon looking at three different rubrics in place by veteran teachers, I was able to construct my own rubric for grading blog portfolios. Attached directly below this post, you can see how I fused together these rubrics to meet the needs of the students in my sixth grade Language Arts classroom.
References
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Third Edition.
Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press, 22.
blogging_rubric.docx |