Using blogs in education

[Marita Thomson]

I was very pleased with myself for getting a feed going from my del.icio.us page to my ASLAonline Ning page (adding aslaning as a tag) after our discussions in the digital literacy strand of the conference. I mentioned one link in particular and then found I had to delete that as there seemed to be some problem with the page, or my link, or whatever. So here is a summary of the page not in my feed anymore:

"How you should use blogs in education" by James Farmer is a post from July 2005 and has a few ideas which are still excellent, although just iceberg tips:

* Incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course - Socially motivating tasks which are part of class activities, not ad ons or with vague instructions.

* Use assessment tasks which incorporate subversion - Don't mandate posting on a rigid schedule as this will kill off the best applications of blogs: personal expression and exploration. Set tasks but make sure they allow for deviation.

* Use blogs for what they are good for - "to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity" (sorry, I couldn't say it any other way - not at this hour of the night.)

* Use proven and effective blogging tools - basically don't bother with the dodgy "blogs" in some content management systems when there are great free sites like blogger, wordpress, edublogs, etc. who have expert developers.

http://blogsavvy.net/how-you-should-use-blogs-in-education ; posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 12:00 pm ; last accessed 18th May, 2008.

[Marita Thomson]

This sounds good Jenny. Our Head of English is wanting a database to both record what kids are reading and give them access to recommendations from peers. We have trialed a Google docs spreadsheet linked to a form that each student fills. This works well as a model but we are having a look at something which we can link to our school database.

The wiki option sounds interesting. Is this a private wiki or can we share to see what you are doing? This is exactly what the HOEnglish wants, but also something easy for them to use - it would be across all years 7 & 8 at present.

[Jenny Power]

Hi again Marita,
We've begun using a wiki with a couple of our Year 7 classes to communicate about their reading. I agree with your observation that 'mandatory' entries defeat the purpose and delight of communicating online, yet there needs to be a loose structure to start the ball rolling. The wiki really promotes communication, particularly when part of the weekly suggestions include "read books reviewed by your classmates and leave them a comment". It's interesting to see that the girls are starting to select books from their friends online suggestions - just as we'd hoped and planned, the wiki is fostering a literary community, at least with one of the classes.
Cheers again,
Jenny

[Kate]

Hi Marita - thanks for sharing!