Blog for your life

 

Technology has come a long way since these were games. These were around when I was a primary school kid. The main difference I can see is that we've gone from consumers of content to creators of it.



If you're not familiar with how we work at Castlemaine North, I guess one of the most important things to know is that we are big into kids creating content. To do this, the guts of what we do is blogging. In fact, this might frighten some people, but our students record all their learning on their own blog. They are the equivalent of the student's exercise book. Every student has their own blog (sometimes more than one), and as teachers, we can make our own blogs very easily for whatever purpose.

In various forums, I've had to advocate why we work like this. The reasons that I've put together are below. In the coming days, I'd like to share what specific technologies we've used to do this and why. But for now, I want to put forward the "why" of blogging as a record of student learning.

 

Advantages for students

• Aids organisation - All students do is press "publish" and your work is there in chronological order. Categories enable students to organise their work with one click - and work can be put into more than one category, so a science report could go under "science" and "writing". Couldn't be easier to stay organised.

• Available any time, anywhere - Wherever you've got an internet connection, you can add to your blog, read the blogs of others, and comment on blogs.

• Enables sharing of any digital content - Audio, video, Powerpoints, PDF, images... if it can be saved as a file, it can go on a blog.

• Personalised - As minor as it may sound, the ability for kids to install themes and add widgets gives them ownership over their blog, and it can reflect themselves as learners and as people.

• Gives student choice in how they show understanding - I don't want a student's lack of writing skills to impede their ability to show their understanding of maths. Students can choose to speak their work, make a model of their work and photograph it, even handwrite it and scan it - blogs give the student far more choice in how they do the work.

• Enables greater teacher feedback - A student can receive feedback anytime, anywhere. And with the teacher being able to give it anywhere they have an internet connection, the student is more likely to receive it, too.

• Enables self assessment - Comment on your own blog a week, a term, a year after you've done the work.

• Enables peer feedback - Your teacher isn't the only one who can give you feedback. Get feedback from other learners - perhaps not in the same class, or year level.

• Records a learning journey over time - Because it is in chronological order, you can scroll down on your blog and go back in time. See how your learning has progressed.

• Provides an audience for writing - Who would see your work in an exercise book? Your teacher, perhaps? Now, work can be shared with the entire school community with one click. When you write, you are writing for an audience. And for some kids, that's an enormous motivator.

• Enables recording of off-line activities - Doing something that doesn't involve a computer? A role-play, group discussion, making models? With a video camera, still camera or a voice recorder, all these things can be recorded and put up on the blog as a record of learning.

• Can't be lost - You'd be surprised how hard it is to lose work on a blog. They autosave every few minutes, and it doesn't matter if a student forgets their computer at home, or the computer goes down for good - the work is all there on the blog.