Entry #11

Reflection upon Blog

Blogs can be great things for reflection and sharing of your own ideas.  They allow for the exploration of ideas and the free brainstorming that can be instrumental to exploratory growth of critical thinking.  This particular blog, I appreciate as it will be a permanent place for me to reference many of my thoughts from during the course.  In 8 weeks, there is so much to process that being able to go back and review once it is completed is a wonderful tool.  This is extremely evident in that the online system World Class does not allow access to prior courses.  So any and all conversations that were on those discussion boards are gone.  Sad, as there are rich discusion and great resources in there.  There simply is not a way to save it all within the system to be able to access it at a later time.  This allows for that opportunity.

At the same time, Blogs instead of forums, also limit the amount of interaction between students.  With having each student create their own, it makes the collaboration between students not so flowed or with structure.  As a result, there is not as much rich discusion as one finds in a forum scenario.  The structure is not great for anything larger than the small classes that we have for online work.

I have used blogs, but created them as a forum.  This is where I have the page developed and then students all come to that page to share ideas and thoughts about specific topics.  For advance placement students, this is great for use with summer assignments.  For my regular/low achieving students, the forum only works when specifically targeting certain elements of content and using it to measure language development in a more relaxed format.  Students like it for that fact.  It allows for the discusion of ideas without the formality of essay.  Teachers like it as it provides a written record of what is discussed for formal assessment purposes which is much harder in the classroom socratic seminar format.  The biggest issue is that students are not always diligent in posting.  They will also want to know how it is "scored" for a grade as many will take the attitude that it is about the number of posts and not about the quality of posts.  This is a subjective thing then to grade if it is not quantitative and hence harder for students to know exactly what is expected.  The benefit is that teachers can differentiate scoring based upon student ability with critical thinking and with language.