Instructional Strategies for Blogging

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Instructional Strategies for Blogging

Statement categories and the development of the individual learning voice

5/9/2007

By Ruth Reynard

In order for students to learn about different cultures, including the cultures of their own classmates, a teacher fosters their learning by providing them with culturally diverse opportunities within/without the classroom.
There are three points that I consider being most important to my role as a public educator and proponent of democracy drawn from [the text]…
It does, however, cause some apprehensions when applied to education. Educational decisions should be based on the application of knowledge from sound research. I'm not certain this is always possible or even probable when…
Parental involvement is key to successful schools according to [the text]. Parental involvement has increased in the eight years I've been at my current school, yet we still have far to go.

Once I established these statement categories, I could find samples more easily through the work of students in their blogs. As a result, the following is a percentage breakdown of the statements overall I calculated after reading through the course blogs (over the two-year period):

Self-reflection (25 percent), although often this leads to the other stages so should not be graded as a separate category;
Learning commentary (55 percent);
New ideas (10 percent); and
Application of learning (10 percent).

While the learning commentary statements are the most frequent, this does not disconnect them from any of the other categories; nor do they take place necessarily before or after the other categories. It seems, however, that students enjoy analyzing course content and making those connections for themselves. Additionally, the self-reflection takes place throughout the course and helps to facilitate the other statement categories.

Many students, however, struggle with the idea of self-reflection, which may be a reason for the most attention being given to the commentary statements. It should be noted, however, that the students in my courses tend to be adult students, and these designations and percentages may differ with student age or course content. For example, younger students may not struggle to the same degree with self-disclosure given the increase in blogging activity for younger-aged people. Also, it should be considered that the courses I teach address educators already working in their field of practice. With undergraduate students and without considerable experience in a profession, the application of learning may be a smaller percentage of frequency.

Strategies to effectively integrate blogging in course instruction

Instructional design
Blogging must be integrated early in the course design and must be clearly connected to the course outcomes before it can become anything more than just an extra task for the students (Reynard, 2005).

It is vital that blogging is purposefully designed into the course. That is, students need to understand clearly, through the course syllabus, the purpose of blogging throughout the course.