Embedded Task 1

Embedded Task 1

Firstly I want to remind you that my subject areas are accounting and ICT.  I’ve been looking around and I think it is true what that they say about accountants and computer nerds being a pretty boring lot.  I want to break the mold.  My experience of blogs in education is related to my tertiary teaching background and in this embedded reflection I want to explore more closely how Blogs can be used as an educational tool in Secondary Education.

This week I have been studying the three ‘soft’ tools (ICTs For Learning Design Course Material Topic 3:  Digital Tools 1 – Web Spaces).  The three soft tools are blogs, wikis and web sites.  A Blog is a Web Log or online journal and it has three main spaces, the subject header, the side bars and the posts.  Blogs can also have static pages and these can be used for general information such as information about the project and contact details.

The Youtube clip in the ICTS for Learning Design Course Material covers the technical process of Blogs.  I like this clip by Common Craft which discusses at a much higher level the role of Blogs in the media.  

Straight away from my own experience, just being let loose with a blog is quite challenging because I was scared by the white page and I didn’t know what to write.  So, my first learning is that when I am using this in my class, I need to scaffold the learning to ensure that my students able to make a productive start.    

Probably just the same as everyone in the class I have wasted way too much time exploring the big wide world of Blogs.  I can see that there are two approaches to creating a Blog.  The first is to let the students explore the blog and write what they like.  The second approach is to use a direct instruction approach and depending on the age and experience of the students, to scaffold some specific tasks.  I think that in a class I would use a mixture of both approaches because they both have merit, sometimes letting the students be very creative and sometime creating an structured process.

When I first looked into the use of Blogs in education I was thinking quite narrowly about using them as a ‘Web Log’ or online journal to record reflections.   As a Distance Educator working for the Open Polytechnic in New Zealand during the early 2000s, this was certainly my first experience of Blogs.  We used the Blog as a reflective journal and we used it much the same as it is being used in this course, to ensure that distance learners are engaging with the course materials early and to ensure that students are reflecting and thinking rather than doing a fairly low level process of trying to write the assignment without reading the course materials.

A little exploration has shown me that there are two main groups of Blogs in education; 1. Blogs written by the teacher about the class with comments by parents and possibly students.  2.  Blogs written by students or groups of students about any project that they are working on.  In the first group, the intent is to engage parents and families and this is often done through providing updates on homework tasks, which can be used by students if they forget or by parents who want to check.  For example, Miss Jordan’s blog  gives daily updates of class activities.  Although this blog is for a primary class, I really like the way that Miss Jordan asks questions at the end of her Blog posts to prompt students in making comments on her post and this is something that implemented at the end of my Blog post.   In the second group, the intent is to engage students with really entertaining and possible humorous content.  For example, English for Uni Blog which supports English as a second language students to learn English.  I especially like the rich comments which are added to this blog including comments from a student researching English colloquial expressions finding that these are relevant to age and not culture.  This is a really admirable project and when I was a Uni Lecturer, I wish we had provided support like this for our ESL students in the same way as Adelaide Uni has done with their English for Uni Blog.

As I said, I used way too much time visiting Blogs.  First I made a list and then I used the PMI table to try to synthesize the large amount of information that I had collected.

PMI        Plus,  Minus and Interesting for Blogs in Education

P	M	I
#  Blogging about helping secondary students to blog.  Good points on how to scaffold learning.  # Blogs used to reinforce class learning.  The maths blog goes over what the teacher taught today and allows students to revise at home or to catchup.   # A list of top 10 ways that blogs are used.  Lots of examples here – including how to link a class blog to individual blogs and to show the step by step process, such as setting up robots.	#  Only one of the three schools that I might attend for my EPL uses a Blog – St Johns – uses a newsletter approach in addition to the weekly newsletter.  Posts every 6 months of extra-curricular activities that they do.  Requires a lot of commitment and time. http://roma.catholic.edu.au/current-news.html	# I found lots of blogs by teachers about engaging games to play.   Also interesting comments about engagement - has ESL Games #I found some ideas about photos and videos and one teacher suggests that photos of students used for the blogs can be used so long as there are groups of students and individual students are not tagged or named.  However, I think that each school may have a different stance.

(PMI adopted from Global Education)

I have some reservations about relying on blogs for educational ways to integrate ICT into classes because there is no educational peer reviewed science to back up the practice with research showing that the approach works.  In the case of The Edu Blogger there are links to AITSL (Australian Professional Standards for Teachers), which suggests that for example the use of ePortfolios are compliant, but I am not sure that the approach can achieve the intended outcomes.

In my search of Blog ideas I tried to search out some ideas for using blogs in my specialty of ICT & Business/Economics.  I think that a blog could be used as a tool for a sequenced share trading activity where the students do a paper (simulated) trading task and follow the progress of their chosen share portfolio across several weeks.  I have used the SAMR model to explore the ways in which the education benefit of a paper share trading activity may be transformed ;-) by using a blog.

SAMR – Using a Blog to record learning about share trading for each level of the SAMR

Substitution	Augmentation	Modification	Redefinition
Students use the Blog to write a reflection of their share trading portfolio the same way they would if using a paper spreadsheet.	Students use the Blog to link to resources that they used to choose their share trading strategy and their shares and use the spreadsheet to calculate formulae and to play ‘what-if’ to explore the effect of different variables on the outcome.	In groups, the students create an animated video showing a parable story of how money is made on the stock market and post a link to this to their blog.  (ie the students are learning a process and then teaching others).	Students share their blog posts about how they chose a share trading strategy for their exercise with another class in another location and practice reviewing other share trading strategies and reflecting on other strategies in their own blog.

(SAMR table adapted from Technology Is Learning)

Interestingly, Mitchell State School (where I am placed for my first EPL) uses Facebook as a sort of photo journal.  I know that schools have stayed away from Facebook a lot because comments can be difficult.   The purpose of the Facebook page is to engage with parents and this works really well because of notifications and 20-30 year old mums of primary school children are avid Facebook users.  I don’t think the parents would visit a blog as regularly unless facebook notifications were turned on.   I think that the Facebook page is fairly limited in terms of extending any learning, but it is simple, quick to create a post and is shared well by the parents.  Thinking about the SAMR for the Mitchell State School Facebook page, this would be something that is almost impossible to do without social media.  If the teachers created a ‘learning story’ on a sheet of paper with group photos and a little comment, they could send it home with students, but it wouldn’t be commented in the same way and it certainly would not be returned the next day with comments on from the parents.   So I argue that the Mitchell State School facebook page is an example of redefinition according to the SAMR.

So what do you think?   

What is the coolest Business/ICT Blog idea that you have come across?   

Does your EPL school use Blogs?  

 Can Facebook replace some of the function of a Blog?   

What kind of approval is needed at your school to put photos of students doing activities on your Blog?   

Please comment below.

Reference List
Global Education Teacher resources to encourage a global perspective across curriculum (2012) http://www.globaleducation.edu.au/resources-gallery/resource-gallery-templates.html
Technology is Learning https://sites.google.com/a/msad60.org/technology-is-learning/samr-model