Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Individual and Whole Class Blogs
What must you consider when deciding to have a class blog where every student contributes to a single blog or having every student, as in a 1:1 setting, create and maintain their individual class blog? Could you do both? Would you? How? Why? What would be the purpose(s) of each of these blogging configurations?
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My goal this school year was to create an online forum where students could post work and have others respond to it. My biggest concern with a blog was control. I wanted to be able to control what was being posted and what was being said in response to the post. I also wanted something that was relatively easy for elementary school children to use and easy for me to monitor. Last year our school had Think.com accounts for all the students and management of posts was a big challenge. Teachers were expected to check their student sites, monitoring content and comments. Not only was this task time consuming, it was incredibly frustrating due to the fact that most of what was posted was not school related.
After much investigation we found ed.voicethread. It is a site that allows me to monitor student posts and students can respond to work posted through text, doodling, voice and video recording. I just got the class on the site Monday and I am amazed at their progress, especially with my learning disabled students. When I can figure out how to share it (I currently have it set up as a private account) I’ll share the link. I find this site meets my needs, especially in the area of differentiating instruction.
Later on the year I plan to set up a blog for the class. My goal will be to use it for book talks and literature circles. My plan is to have one blog for the class. I want to focus on reading so the children can discuss books they have in common and hopefully the online discussion will enhance comprehension and open them up to ideas they hadn’t considered.
From my experience last year I wouldn’t consider individual blogs for my kids but my hope would be that the foundation I am building in elementary school would prepare them for more advanced technology in middle and high school.
If you choose to have a class blog where every student participates you must consider ways to structure the blog so that every student is required to make an individual response rather than just jumping off from a classmate's post. I think that an individual blog for each student might be the best for my purposes in a humanities course. That way I would be able to get a unique view into how each student is feeling about our course. The whole class blog certainly provides a new outlet for peer collaboration but I think as a humanities instructor who already hears lots of whole class discussion, I would be most interested in the students' inner thoughts.
In creating a classroom blog, you must establish rules of behavior (respect, expectations, etc) so that each students knows the ground rules for participation. You also have to establish clear rules (i.e. number of posts and what you want to see in posts). A good model is always helpful. I don't think I would ask students to do both for the class. It takes up too much time. I think if you establish an whole course blog that encourages open and honest thought and exchange, you won't need the individual blogs.
I suppose the method you choose for classroom blogging is directly related to your comfort level as a blogger. As I am not very comfortable, I would stick to allowing students to post in the classroom blog to maximize my control of the situation. I am a middle school principal and I think that middle school students would benefit from more restriction but as they get older and more proficient blogging for the classroom, I believe they should be given more autonomy and therefore able to create their own blogs.
Another important factor to consider is the possible audiences outside of the classroom. If the goal is to share information with other schools, or students outside the school, I believe the teacher should maintain more control by having students post within a classroom blog.
As an aside, I am writing this blog on my home computer a 2002 Dell with Windows XP. Every time I write the word blog, blogger, blogging, it shows up as a misspelling. This computer is only 6 years old but it does not recognize these terms. I feel kind of like my computer, out of date in the digital age.
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