This is a difficult question for me to answer because I am not a fan of blogging. However, as I am thinking about how I could use it in the classroom it does have its benefits.
1. Personally, blogging can be use as a way to reflect. Reflection is very beneficial as it can help a teacher grow and make lessons and activities better for their students. For student teaching we were required to keep a journal to reflect upon the day's activities and I found it easier to set up a blog rather than type in word and print out each journal. Since it is so simple and can easily be set up, blogger is a great way to reflect, especially for those who are reluctant reflectors (Me!!!) anyway.
2. I think that blogger could be used for classroom group work. A teacher could assign a math problem and instead of using class time for the students to work together they could do it as a group on blogger. My idea is that one person would begin and share some ideas about how to begin the problem and then another group member would respond to the presented ideas and agree, disagree, and add to the discussion. This process would continue until the group "solved" the problem to the best of their ability. I think the group would have to be limited to 2 or 3 in order to have good discussion and problem solving occur. Also, the problem used for the group to solve should not contain too many equations because that would be difficult for students to type into the blog. Using a blog to do group work is a nice way to be sure that all members are participating. In a classroom setting it may be difficult to determine if every member participated, but on blogger you could easily see who tried and who took the time to think about the problem and then begin to solve it. I think this would need a few trial runs before the students were able to successfully work with blogger to solve a problem in a group, but I think it has many benefits!
3. The last way I think blogging could be used in the classroom is for teachers to communicate with their students. As students are doing their homework they may have questions that arise that will prevent them from moving on or completing the work. If they "blogged" a question to the teacher they might get an answer to their question and then be able to do the homework. The only problem with this is that the teacher would need to check frequently through the night to see if anyone has posted. I think that Christa mentioned that if you connect to your email address you could get an email stating that a student posted, so maybe that would be the direction to go. From my experience of being in the high school, many students said to me "I didn't understand anything" as I checked off their homework. Obviously I know that isn't true, but if this blogging set up was in play, then the students would have no excuse for not getting help and would be more responsible for their grade that they would be given on their homework. This might be more of a pain than something helpful, I'm not sure, but I think it would be worth a try and if it fails then the teacher can scrap it or modify it enough so that it works for both the students and the teacher.
4 comments:
I've been having problems posting to your blog! Ugh! Here's attempt #3 (they are getting progressively shorter!)
With regards to your point #3, (and I do realize it is your last point) which would be more effective: blogging or emailing questions to the teacher? Are today's high school students using email or other technology to ask teachers questions, or do they not make the effort and just wait until class to ask? Curious what your experiences have been. Any one can comment on this question.
My experience from the 10th grade has been that the students wait until class and then say "I didn't understand anything" and show you a blank sheet of homework. I think to avoid this, I would tell the students that they can email or blog a question to me. My responsibility then would be to check my email and blog every night as late as I could, so that I could answer any questions. The students then would know that it is their responsibility to ask any questions before class time or at least make an attempt at doing the homework. At this point I feel that email is probably easier for the students then blogging, but from what I have observed the students do not make the effort anyway, however unfortunate that it is!
Trina you said, "I would love to be able to show my students how to do something on the graphing calculator so that they could visually see how something happens. Many students learn visually, so this would aide to their understanding". I definetely agree with you Trina, I am a visual learner myself. As a student in high school I learned how to graph sine, cosine, and tangent graphs by hand and my teacher did not show us using a graphing calculator. It was good to understand how to graph by hand, but it would have been so much more helpful to have a balance of using a graphing calculator and learning how to do it by hand.
This is really great about the use of calculators in graphing. I had only a slate and chalk (well not quite :) ). But really, I learn kinesthetically (with hands) and the act of drawing a pencil line on paper is extremely gratifying. In fact my first job was as a chartist - drawing charts on paper with an ink pen, like a draftman with a t-square. If computers had not come along, I would still be doing it. Calculators eliminate the hand drawing and since you cannot print from them, this continues to those famous blank pieces of paper. Aren't they great? ( I also don't know if you can transfer the graph from a calculator onto a computer and then into a blog.
RE email, I think that I would be swamped. There is very little time in a day when you teach. Thank goodness that the students don't do homework. :)
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