Blog+Twitter=Digital Logbook

Hi all,

I am a staff member of the College of Medicine of the University of Lagos, Lagos Nigeria. I can see that classroom 2.0 promotes the use of social media for teaching and learning. As a staff of the above school I teach laboratory techniques to undergraduate dental students involving the use of dental materials and equipment for manufacture of dental prostheses. This role involves scientific knowledge of dental materials and understanding of human body to be able to fabricate dental prostheses for the use of dental patients. Additional roles that I play are administrative as well as supervisory. For example I supervise and train dental technology students on industrial training from different schools in Nigeria.

 These roles have given me the opportunities of using technology to enhance my work and to improve on student learning.

One of the things I do with technology is what I am about to give its details here. I called it blog+twitter digital logbook. For short BT digital logbook.

BT Logbook: It is a simple combination of blog and twitter social media for recording daily or weekly work performed by a student on industrial training. I recommend blogger which already has a twitter tab below every entry. Blogger provides free space of over a thousand megabites for users. This means that when a students makes video, picture or audio entries of his work there will still be enough space left to take as much entry as a student may need all through his industrial training year. See in this link  importance of digital logbook as compared with paper based logbook.

BT logbook will require that each student has a gmail, twitter, and blogger accounts which can be obtained free from google and twitter platforms. Student will need to set his privacy for fellow students and industry supervisor to be his followers and provide addresses of his twitter and blog to other students, school authority and industry supervisor. Paper based logbook only allows a students to draw and write about his learning experiences during industrial training but BT logbook allows more opportunities for representing student's learning experiences in ways that will be very convincing that learning indeed takes place. Some of these ways are by showing video, audio, and pictures of his works and by providing additional link that shows depth of knowledge.

Supervision of dental technology students on industrial training requires the use of logbook but like many vocational  schools around the world paper based logbook is popular.  In fact, I have not in all of my searches so far find any school anywhere in the world that have digitised logbook for students' industrial training. I observed a number of constraints in the use of paper based logbook and this led to the idea of blog+twitter digital logbook. I will like member of this community to look at this idea further  here and to offer suggestion and if possible try it in any way possible.

Although this idea was conceived when I considered the constraints associated with my supervision of dental technology students on industrial training at my end while using paper based logbook I believe it will serve in all vocational education training programmes. I thought of BT digital logbook as a good option especially because it will cost the user little or nothing to own and regardless of whether the school has a web presence or not it can be adopted for industrial training. BT logbook will be very popular in developing countries where issue of cost is one of the major hindrances for integration of technology in school curriculum, and pedagogy.

I will appreciate it if anyone has information about the use of digital logbook for industrial training by any institution around the world and better still if anyone would try this novel idea.

My interest is to also share this idea here seeing that social media is the major focus and hopefully it may arouse interest that will further develop it.