The concept of blogging has become rapidly interesting to me, and when I become very interested in something, I spend hours researching and reading about it. The countless reading I have done about blogging convinced me that I should integrate blogging into my curriculum because of its many benefits:
- empowers students
- enables students to have a voice that they can't find during classroom hours
- promotes creativity (with writing style and the pictures and links they can add)
- builds stronger writers because their writing is being published
- students can help each other grow as writers because of the commenting feature
- allows for reflection (**ahem- something I learned long after my students had been blogging)
After a few months of student blogging, I decided to categorize my data and conceptualize my findings so that I could make blogging more beneficial for my students and help other teachers who decide to incorporate blogging into their curriculum.
Here is my research in a presentation format using both prezi and present.me:
The Value of Student Feedback
I can’t help but feel envious of your life changing experience within New Media and Literacies. This is a course I need to take and feel that this course leads perfectly into New Med/Lit.
ReplyDeleteI like your options that you’ve provided within prompts. Much like we find in real life, students need to find what they’re going to do, how, and why. I noticed you gave them goals. Have you ever allowed them to create their own goal? This could even be done by reviewing previous responses from peers and the educator to help guide them toward genuine growth.
I also liked that you focused on positive assessments within peer work. I recently discussed assessment of my narrative writings with a “Dr.” and she discussed a conference she attended where students respond better to actual feedback than numbers and percentages.
I like how students were moral; they used respect and critiqued while encouraging and focusing on what is positive. It’s obvious that you’ve developed an atmosphere that fosters mature and challengingly helpful responses from one individual toward another.
Yes--you NEED New Media and Literacies in your life! I had a similar life-changing experience :)
DeleteHuzzah, this is what I need. I need my mind altered on this. I wonder how my expectations will affect my perception of the content (since all the previous classes I took I had none or negative expectations and the class went above and beyond). Maybe I'll try to forget I know about this course.
DeleteLaura, I'm so glad you pursued this question. It's something I'd been trying to figure out as I've started having my students keep their own blogs. One of the reasons I decided to transfer my class assignments to the web was so they could authentically read and respond to each other's writing. An audience of one just isn't enough to make students feel like writing is real communication. I found your results to really match my casual observations of my students.
ReplyDeleteI was drawn in by your questions, especially the first two. One of the natural consequences or results of great writing is the response it elicits. And I've tried to encourage students to respond well to each other, but I've also tried to allow for some natural responses.
I've gone from having a rigid formula for students to follow--( 1) what I hear you saying is . . . 2) what impacted me most in your post was . . . 3) this raised for me a question . . .) to saying, "just respond like a normal human being to another normal human being." When you read response after response of the same formula, you begin to wonder if it's authentic. When you let them free to respond however, you enter into some unpredictable and sometimes iffy territory.
I also really agreed with your conclusion that reflection could really help the students to improve in their writing. So I'm experimenting with this by having my students write reflections about some of their blog posts. I'm looking forward to seeing their writing be enhanced by trying to really read it, reflectively. We'll see how it goes.
So, thank you Laura, for sharing this! It's really great.
First, I was really interested to see how your students handled blogging as a writing assignment each week. I think blogging is a medium that really meets students where they are as far as technology is concerned. I am sure if you asked them to perform the same task with paper and pen, the results would have differed greatly. I also thought it was effective that you made it clear that all blogs are not the same, how a student responds in a passion blog will not be the same as a response in class-related blog. I personally believe that the more students write, the better the writing becomes. I am sure you were happy to see that the students' rhetoric and grammar improved as they continued writing. I'm sure they appreciated the fact that you allowed them to choose the best 4 posts to submit in the end for assessment. Putting students in charge of their own learning seems to always be beneficial.
ReplyDeleteDid you know I wrote my New Media and Literacies paper about the impacts of blogging?! I was so excited when I saw this was your topic! I had the same thought about the overall benefit: was it just something I wanted to do for the technology aspect, or was it actually benefiting them in some way? I think that we have discussed in this class about how technology gives all students an equal playing field for their voice to be heard, so that is for sure one of the benefits, but I was interested to see how much you found reflection to be influential in this concept. We so often encourage peer review and response that we tend to forget about the self-assessment importance, as well. At least, I tended to do that until we had some great discussions in this class about tweaking assessment to be more focused on students' involvement.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I have been sitting here for a good three minutes literally reflecting on the idea of reflection. I'm intrigued. Again, this is something I do often without thinking: Do a project/do a reflection/repeat. But truly, to really dig in and appreciate what they're reflecting could show me such great insight into their actual learning. Your findings really opened up my eyes to expansive opportunities in this area!
One more thing--I like that you prepped students with criteria of how to respond. This reminds me of comments on my own Inquiry Project in that I need to be more aware of things that feel obvious to me as a teacher might not seem that obvious to them. Okay, that sounded like Day One of Teaching School stuff, but I think what I mean by that is something more complicated. It kind of goes with Bethany's (and Aaron's!) Inquiry Projects on targets and goals. If we lay it out for them, we (hopefully) take away one step of the assignment that could be intimidating. This is wonderful--to provide a guide for them as they approach their own analysis of a reading. Plus, giving them choice always makes it a teensy bit more fun. Not sure why, but it always works this way! :)
Thanks-this was great :)