Using a blog as an educational tool
Blogs are being used by educators to not only provide another means of communication between them and their students (and potentially a larger audience), but also to increase the skill level of students in using current technology.
A starting point may be to use the blog as a means of posting outlines of daily work, and requesting feedback and updates from students on their progress. Like any new activity, expectations and guidelines need to be reviewed in advance; a good opportunity to discuss what is appropriate to post on a school or work-related website.
NOTE: A couple recommendations to deal with concerns around appropriate use during the learning process:
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Limit access (at least in the beginning) to just your students. This eliminates one of the main opportunities of blogging, but it also may deal with any initial security concerns arising from blogging and access to your information.
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Have student comments come to your email first before they appear on the blog. This allows the instructor to moderate comments and discussions as appropriate.
ADVANCED: Once you are comfortable with using a blog for the course, you may want to consider setting up individual blogs for each student. An obvious fit is as a daily log of work completed.
REALLY ADVANCED: It is possible to get an RSS feed from each student blog and use an RSS feed reader on your course blog so that you can see at a glance what all your students have been posting. Or so a 17 year old Wikipedia editor informed me as she directed me to this article on RSS. |
