Reflective Online Teaching: Week 5: Educational Blogs

Educational Blogs

Blogs are used for many different purposes. In regards to education, we can find two basic types: Class Blogs and Student Blogs. Although this is not an extensive classification of blogs, in this particular analysis, let’s include the Teacher Blogs as well.

Based on my particular experience, I have been working with blogging for three college terms in a row (since January 2010). At the beginning, for a university project on Web 2.0, I decided to work with blogs to enhance my students’ understanding of short stories studied in the university’s Reading Skills 2 class, and, to somehow, help students develop their sense of editing when writing, since it was very common to find lots of syntactical mistakes, problems with word choice, and the wrong use of verb tenses.

For Reading Skills 2 I created a class blog to post a step-by-step analysis of a story entitled Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne in a WebQuest format [1]. Since I was not sure how things would come out, I just designed one WebQuest. Eventually, I included other stories, and some other assignments for students to complete. Giving them the class blog’s address was an easy task; keeping up their good work among students a tough task. At the end, this online experience proved to be worth the effort, and that is why I continue to use it by changing bits every quarter.

Since the very first class blog I created for a university course on reading skills, I have asked my Reading Skills 2 students to create their personal student blogs. The first quarter (January to April 2010) [2], I used this PBL task with two WebQuests and a creative writing short story analysis in a cartoon-like format. The second quarter (May to August 2010) [3], I just worked on my students with two WebQuests and a novella analysis for the final examination. And this last term (September to December 2010) [4], we have already worked on two WebQuests, a glog with another short story analysis, and a cartoon-like analysis of a science fiction story. Most of this material is posted on their blogs or in the class wiki.

After all this rewarding experiences, I decided to work on a class blog for Pronunciation 1 [5] that I have not been able to fully develop. There are lots of things I want to include, but it takes time to work on each post. I also have two other sub-developed class blogs for Reading Skills 1 [6] and Pronunciation 2 [7]. And after I took an online course on the methodology regarding case studies, I created another class blog for my Oral Communication 4 class [8] to use this methodology and its scope in language learning.

In order to deal with student questions, because all of these class blogs are password protected, I included a “shout box” or a “chat box” for students to leave their comments or questions. And in the case of student blogs in Reading Skills 2, I encourage them to edit their posts because they do not want other people to see their grammar mistakes. Some of them have edited their entries; some others have left what they produced the way it was after I gave them my “written” feedback.

Finally, I have tried to keep a Reflective Teacher Blog [9] ever since I started leaving my Web imprints. Now that I am taking this online course with Laurate: ENGT.TDM3.EN.2010.T4.A, I have kept on leaving my reflections on my blog. Based on this lengthy online experience this year, I am sure that all teachers should have some kind of Web site that can host a blog for them to mull over the things they have been able to achieve along a school term, a school year, etc.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Links to blogs:

[1] http://bin-08-reading-skills-ii.blogspot.com/

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsii/

[3] https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsiiii2010/

[4] https://sites.google.com/site/bin08readingskillsiiiii2010/

[5] http://bin-02.blogspot.com/

[6] http://bin-04.blogspot.com/

[7] http://bin-06.blogspot.com/

[8] http://bin-14.blogspot.com/