The benefits of blended learning are plenty and the most recent educational standards require digital literacy to be built into every class curriculum. Blended learning enables students to:
- Access vast amounts of online information and professional communities and thus broadening their perspective.
- Interact and engage with professional communities, classmates and instructor more frequently.
- Participate in discussions when/how they are comfortable. Online space becomes a safe environment in which they've had time to reflect and share their thoughts.
-Personalize their experience by moving forward or repeating certain aspects of course curriculum at their own pace.
- Be motived by immediate results and feedback through automated quiz scoring and comments from peers.
- Be 21st Century ready because they are digitally capable, can work and collaborate online, and can solve problems in real world context.
Blogs offer the teacher of writing a way to harness the benefits of blended learning to her/his student's advantage. In my last post I linked to the case study correlating positive writing skill improvement through use of blogs as curriculum. Although the study focused on use of blogs to immerse students in a foreign language, I feel the positive outlook still holds true for writing in English class.
Some highlights from the case study include:
- At first students were surprised they had to blog, the overall experience was very rewarding for them.
- Total word count on ungraded blog assignments were higher than graded blog assignments (I translate this to positively point to student's enjoyment and need for freedom of expression.)
- Citing other research concluding that "writing on computers and communicating in cyberspace is highly motivational", "writing became a 'fun' activity", "students tended to write less self-consciously and were more engaged in the process",
- Overall students improved their use of language and sentence accuracy.
- Student survey reveals that 100% of students feel they are somewhat or much more comfortable communicating in writing after using blogs.
- Student survey reveals that 76.9 % of students liked writing blogs while 15.3 % didn't like it but 7.6 % really liked it. And 69% felt they wrote more because they were writing online.
Finally, I like to share From Blog to Book Deal: How 6 Authors Did It with my students. Its an interesting listing and interview with six blog authors on how their online writing became money-making great selling books! The blogs cover a variety of topics ranging in content from collection of pictures, a collection of quotes, how to start your business, fatherly advise, and others.
Other examples of blogs turned into books can be found at: How to Blog a Book, Popular Blog Turned Book Books, Websites that Became Books, and Blog-Turned-Book Success Stories.
Go ahead and start using blogs. Your students will truly benefit and find their voice.
Happy Writing!
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Blogging Manifesto Part 4/4- Blogs & New Ways of Learning
Blogs and New Ways of Learning
What is often missed in writing class is relevance, context ,and audience. A student hands in a written draft assignment to the teacher, expects feedback, modifies draft into a final written 'paper', hands it in, then its done! That's it -the final assignment is graded and is filed away with little significance to student or teacher.
There are several ways to thinking about teaching and learning that have emerged in the online learning arena. These include: Challenge-Based Learning, Video Communications, and Micro lectures.
Challenge-Based Learning (CBL): are interdisciplinary and involve wider community. CBL begins with big idea/issue that needs to be evaluated, researched, and acted upon by the student. Blogs, wikis, and web cameras are some tools students can use on such projects. Exposing students to CBL opportunities gives their work relevance and context. Students can use their blogs to reach out to the community via surveys or questionnaires, document their research findings, and finally post their take action initiative that help address the big issue. Here are useful examples of student- led challenges and solutions.
Video Communications: The ease of use of cell phone or computer cameras in young hands coupled with ease of online video publishing gives students an added communications medium. Students can be encouraged to create a video production of a fictional story they wrote, documentary of project work, or create a digital story of their choice.
Micro Lectures: Students can be encouraged to create their own micro lecture with the purpose of advising or tutoring an absent peer for example and post it on their blog. Having student present key concepts of a lesson in form of a micro lecture forces them to focus on a single important point of foundational concept.
Blogging Assignments
How to Teach with Blogs is a long but thorough post on how to effectively use blogs for educational purposes. I love that it lists non-negotiable as well as negotiable 'rules' when using blogs in the classroom. It offers educators a lot of flexible ideas when incorporating blogs in the curriculum.
Also check out Using blogging as a learning tool & A better blogging assignment for useful tips and tricks to incorporating blogs in your curriculum. Blogging as Writing Curriculum also gives nice ideas on how to mix prompted and free post assignments.
Two rules I like to stick with in my own classroom:
- Individual personalized blogs work best. They are learner centered offers student ability to create their own online presence...here I am, hear me roar.
- Minimal prompt allows freedom of thought and expression. Student choice of topic and mode of expression (multimedia) give optimal autonomy and independence...log, journaling, photo gallery, storytelling...
Some reasons why I love using blogs in my classroom:
- Open forum builds communities and relationships. Ability to link to others and receive and give back comments allows for communication, reflection, debate, elaboration.
- Blogs offer authentic learning by exposing students to real-world context/topics - drives cognitive learning.
- Blogs drive the message that writing and self-expression in general have long term benefit and go beyond English classroom requirements.
Happy blogging...to you and to your students! Don't be shy, famous blogger Andrew Sullivan writes his personal reflection on blogging:
I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog. That makes for more honest writing. It may not be “serious” in the way, say, a 12-page review of 14th-century Bulgarian poetry in the New Republic is serious. But it’s serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible.
Blogging Manifesto Part 3/4 - Blogs & Social Presence
Blogs and Social Presence
I have first hand experienced the negative learning & motivational effects of lack of communication or personal connection in courses when the professor was 'absent' or 'generic' in his/her feedback. I have also experienced negative learning & motivational effects when one-on-one or small group interactions were not part of course work.
This lack of community and interaction made me feel isolated, unmotivated, and with very little relevance to my work. Author Kia Bentley in The Centrality of Social Presence in Online Teaching and Learning defines social presence as the ability to be 'real', 'known', 'connected' and makes learners feel they are treated as human beings. Professors JC Dunlap & PR Lowenthal write, “When their (learner) needs are being taken into account – the more they are likely to learn and learn to learn.”
Bentley further writes, "Social presence has been behaviorally described as relating to a "constellation of cues" in three general categories." Those categories are:
- Affective responses, ie, emotions, humor, self-disclosure, explicit use of feeling words, etc. An interesting blog assignment would be to ask students to reflect on a turning point in their personal lives and write about it. Surely, they will find lots of emotions to express in such a story.
- Open and interactive communications, ie, asking probing questions, agreeing or disagreeing, offering advise, self-reflection, etc. Reading and commenting on peer's blog posts must be integrated in course assessments; otherwise students will be hard pressed to do it. The RISE Model for meaningful feedback will help students stay on task when writing comments to peers.
- Cohesive responses, ie, personal greetings or referring to group as "us" or "we" for the purpose of sustaining relationships. One of the blog assignments can ask students to reflect on and share a group class experience or class discussion session. Ie, "in class we discussed/collaborated on/understood xyz"...have students read each other's reflections and learn different view points on same situation.
Relationships matter in every transaction, especially in a learning environment. Enhancing Social Presence in Online Learning: Mediation Strategies Applied to Social Networking Tools research from Tsai, Kim, Liu, Goggins, Kumalasari and Laffey (2008) “recognized community as an important factor for fostering interactivity or interaction among participation in an online learning environment.” Building community and establishing communication avenues are essential to building that relationship and social presence is how to do that in an online environment.
Bentley advises that a relaxed culture of acceptance and nurturing must exist yet "power and authority must be balanced with the values of community and co-construction." The other challenge is that of making meaning and awareness that emotional/intellectual interpretations of online exchanges can vary greatly from their intended purposes.
Tune in to next (and final) post on more promising ways to use blogs in blended learning arena.
I have first hand experienced the negative learning & motivational effects of lack of communication or personal connection in courses when the professor was 'absent' or 'generic' in his/her feedback. I have also experienced negative learning & motivational effects when one-on-one or small group interactions were not part of course work.
This lack of community and interaction made me feel isolated, unmotivated, and with very little relevance to my work. Author Kia Bentley in The Centrality of Social Presence in Online Teaching and Learning defines social presence as the ability to be 'real', 'known', 'connected' and makes learners feel they are treated as human beings. Professors JC Dunlap & PR Lowenthal write, “When their (learner) needs are being taken into account – the more they are likely to learn and learn to learn.”
Bentley further writes, "Social presence has been behaviorally described as relating to a "constellation of cues" in three general categories." Those categories are:
- Affective responses, ie, emotions, humor, self-disclosure, explicit use of feeling words, etc. An interesting blog assignment would be to ask students to reflect on a turning point in their personal lives and write about it. Surely, they will find lots of emotions to express in such a story.
- Open and interactive communications, ie, asking probing questions, agreeing or disagreeing, offering advise, self-reflection, etc. Reading and commenting on peer's blog posts must be integrated in course assessments; otherwise students will be hard pressed to do it. The RISE Model for meaningful feedback will help students stay on task when writing comments to peers.
- Cohesive responses, ie, personal greetings or referring to group as "us" or "we" for the purpose of sustaining relationships. One of the blog assignments can ask students to reflect on and share a group class experience or class discussion session. Ie, "in class we discussed/collaborated on/understood xyz"...have students read each other's reflections and learn different view points on same situation.
Relationships matter in every transaction, especially in a learning environment. Enhancing Social Presence in Online Learning: Mediation Strategies Applied to Social Networking Tools research from Tsai, Kim, Liu, Goggins, Kumalasari and Laffey (2008) “recognized community as an important factor for fostering interactivity or interaction among participation in an online learning environment.” Building community and establishing communication avenues are essential to building that relationship and social presence is how to do that in an online environment.
Bentley advises that a relaxed culture of acceptance and nurturing must exist yet "power and authority must be balanced with the values of community and co-construction." The other challenge is that of making meaning and awareness that emotional/intellectual interpretations of online exchanges can vary greatly from their intended purposes.
Tune in to next (and final) post on more promising ways to use blogs in blended learning arena.
Blogging Manifesto Part 2/4 -- Blogs & Blended Learning
Blogs and Blended Learning
In Blogging Manifesto Part 1, I introduced educational visionary Marc Prensky and I start here again referencing his 2011 essay From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom in which he contends that "knowledge" per se has moved from the teacher to the Internet and that student's personal passions have become their only motivation to learn. "Our teachers' job -- in fact their very raison d'etre -- is going through enormous change." Prensky suggests teachers partner with students and really listen to their needs because their educational context itself has changed. Listening to students and meeting their educational needs will help them succeed in their own times and lives.
Listen and watch the following student voices video and continue to read below why blogs integrate well in blended learning classroom environment.
Multiple research on best online teaching & learning practices point to two overarching principles. The principle of active learning and principle of interactivity.
Active Learning
“Active learning requires that students are aware of what they know and what they don't know using metacognitive strategies to monitor their own learning.” (McGee P. & Reis A.) Online writing forces one to consider with great depth what they know, what they are thinking, and how to best communicate it through writing. Awareness of a public audience with an ability to comment (shred apart mercilessly or praise wholeheartedly and anything in-between) engages the writer in ever deeper thinking about their writing intentions and content. This is genuine engagement with both content knowledge and public audience.
Interactivity
“Interactivity may involve instructor to student, student to student, or student to others, materials or resources.”(McGee P. & Reis A) Blogging is amazing because it involves all of above activities. The instructor and students have access to and comment on classmates' blogs. The writer is also interacting with other materials and resources when they provide live links to other online materials. These interactions build community and maintain relationships, a key component to online blended learning.
In Blogging Manifesto Part 1, I introduced educational visionary Marc Prensky and I start here again referencing his 2011 essay From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom in which he contends that "knowledge" per se has moved from the teacher to the Internet and that student's personal passions have become their only motivation to learn. "Our teachers' job -- in fact their very raison d'etre -- is going through enormous change." Prensky suggests teachers partner with students and really listen to their needs because their educational context itself has changed. Listening to students and meeting their educational needs will help them succeed in their own times and lives.
Listen and watch the following student voices video and continue to read below why blogs integrate well in blended learning classroom environment.
Students are already online, wired, and networked. We need to educate them where they are and how they want it. In Blended Course Design: A Synthesis of Best Practices authors Patricia McGee & Abby Reis write that blended learning is "seamlessly operational where the transition between classroom meeting and online component is minimal." The authors estimate that 79% of higher education public institutions offer some sort of blended course offerings.
Multiple research on best online teaching & learning practices point to two overarching principles. The principle of active learning and principle of interactivity.
Active Learning
“Active learning requires that students are aware of what they know and what they don't know using metacognitive strategies to monitor their own learning.” (McGee P. & Reis A.) Online writing forces one to consider with great depth what they know, what they are thinking, and how to best communicate it through writing. Awareness of a public audience with an ability to comment (shred apart mercilessly or praise wholeheartedly and anything in-between) engages the writer in ever deeper thinking about their writing intentions and content. This is genuine engagement with both content knowledge and public audience.
Interactivity
“Interactivity may involve instructor to student, student to student, or student to others, materials or resources.”(McGee P. & Reis A) Blogging is amazing because it involves all of above activities. The instructor and students have access to and comment on classmates' blogs. The writer is also interacting with other materials and resources when they provide live links to other online materials. These interactions build community and maintain relationships, a key component to online blended learning.
Tune in to the next post discussing importance of social presence in blended learning.
Blogging Manifesto Part 1/4 - Blogs as Curriculum for Digital Native
Blogs as Writing Curriculum
Blogging is an effective and powerful tool to encourage and sharpen the 21st century student's writing and communication skills so they find relevance, context, and live readership for their writing. Andrew Sullivan, famous blogger for past fifteen years explains the essence of blogging as:
Blogging is an effective and powerful tool to encourage and sharpen the 21st century student's writing and communication skills so they find relevance, context, and live readership for their writing. Andrew Sullivan, famous blogger for past fifteen years explains the essence of blogging as:
a genuinely new mode of writing: its provisionality, its conversational essence, its essential errors, its ephemeral core, its nature as the mode in which writing comes as close as it can to speaking extemporaneously.
Writing is a much hated activity among young students and even adults. It seems complicated, scary, and unnecessary altogether. However, simply put, writing is organizing one's thoughts – in order to share them with another - for the purpose of self-expression. Blogs offer students a personalized public space in which to do that. I recommend educators begin small:
- Maintain your own teaching blog or a class blog. This is great modeling for the students.
- Ask students to visit the blog and write comments. Getting the feel for public writing through short comments will introduce students to public writing and pave their way for their own blog posts.
- Get students to read other blogs. Prepare a list of good weblogs with relevant and appropriate content. Good writing begins with good reading, make sure your list is well picked.
- For their first own post, I like to ask students to introduce themselves in whichever way they want; using text, image, or video. They can create it themselves or find something online that they feel represents them well.
- Next, posts can be simple annotated links with a brief highlight of what they felt was important or meaningful about that link.
- In subsequent posts students begin to be more comfortable delving deeper in thought and draw on personal experiences and reflections in their writing.
Blogging presents ways to extend learning beyond the classroom and mere technology integration and truly take advantage of online learning communities as part of a blended teaching/learning initiative. Blogs allow for intricate links to other posts, images, videos, and multimedia in general. Blogs offer a chance to comment and debate and build relationships.
- Maintain your own teaching blog or a class blog. This is great modeling for the students.
- Ask students to visit the blog and write comments. Getting the feel for public writing through short comments will introduce students to public writing and pave their way for their own blog posts.
- Get students to read other blogs. Prepare a list of good weblogs with relevant and appropriate content. Good writing begins with good reading, make sure your list is well picked.
- For their first own post, I like to ask students to introduce themselves in whichever way they want; using text, image, or video. They can create it themselves or find something online that they feel represents them well.
- Next, posts can be simple annotated links with a brief highlight of what they felt was important or meaningful about that link.
- In subsequent posts students begin to be more comfortable delving deeper in thought and draw on personal experiences and reflections in their writing.
Blogs and Digital Natives
Blogging presents ways to extend learning beyond the classroom and mere technology integration and truly take advantage of online learning communities as part of a blended teaching/learning initiative. Blogs allow for intricate links to other posts, images, videos, and multimedia in general. Blogs offer a chance to comment and debate and build relationships.
Educational visionary Marc Prensky has coined the term "Digital Natives" to refer to young generation who has grown up engulfed with new technology and spend majority of their time using it. Prensky refers to scientific data asserting young student brains may have physically changed and that certainly their thinking patterns, the way they think and process information, have changed.
Digital Natives phrase isn't so much about technology as it is about attitude and culture. In his 2001 essay, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Prensky writes:
Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to "serious" work.
Blogs are really good at personal expression and exploration and meet educational needs of 21st century student.
Receiving information really fast: Blog posts are typically, but not always, short and allow for quick topic introductions. Additional follow-up posts can be written to develop topic further and allow deeper levels of thought. But the main goal still remains that a blog post is short and fast.
Parallel process & multi-task: Blog posts encourage linking to relevant information from the internet. Writer is constantly multitasking between reading, writing, thinking and linking to other material out there.
Graphics: Blog posts encourage the use of graphics and video as stand alone or to supplement written text. An interesting student assignment can require the use of only graphics to represent an idea. Or encourage free expression through self-published video as a post.
Random Access: Blog posts encourage and are greatly enhanced when they link to and from other great content on the web. This allows writer and reader to jump from one link to the next and connect idea to each other.
Networked: Blogs have the added connection to a live readership beyond the classroom instructor. The writer is networked with his/her reader and also with other content providers to whom he/she has linked to.
Instant Gratification & Frequent Rewards: The ability to show your personality via personal blog and self-publishing provides instant gratification. Also, what better way to be rewarded and encouraged than when you receive a comment on your blog.
Games: It can be great fun to incorporate less serious game-like posts into blogging assignments. This fun treasure hunt assignment is a great example of incorporating games into classwork.
Tune in Next post on how to further use blogs in a blended classroom environment.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Thoughts Matter More than Topics
I have to say I've been really enjoying blogging for the past few weeks. As a student, I've experienced the freedom of thought without restriction of topic. As a teacher, I've realized that giving students more freedom actually pushes them beyond my and their own expectations.
But still...a teacher cannot simply say, go write! Learners need some form of guidelines to begin their work. I found good advise in Blogging in the 21st-Century Classroom. Educator Michelle Lampinen posts her own blogging assignment guidelines which were so helpful for me. She wanted to make sure her assignment addressed the following:
Lampinen then reflects on her and her student's experience with the blogs. It is an insightful article worth reading and duplicating its example in your own classroom.
A comment in response to the article written by Brian Sztabnik drew my attention as well. He writes about his own students' use of blogs, "They begin to realize that their thoughts -- not a prescribed topic's narrow confines -- are what matter. I can't begin to tell you what this does for a student's voice and intellectual confidence!"
And instilling that confidence should really be the ultimate goal of any educator.
But still...a teacher cannot simply say, go write! Learners need some form of guidelines to begin their work. I found good advise in Blogging in the 21st-Century Classroom. Educator Michelle Lampinen posts her own blogging assignment guidelines which were so helpful for me. She wanted to make sure her assignment addressed the following:
- Address multiple Common Core standards
- Hold students accountable while minimizing stress
- Be structured enough to provide clarity while giving freedom to experiment
- Be varied enough to keep students engaged
- Get students to write for multiple purposes.
Lampinen then reflects on her and her student's experience with the blogs. It is an insightful article worth reading and duplicating its example in your own classroom.
A comment in response to the article written by Brian Sztabnik drew my attention as well. He writes about his own students' use of blogs, "They begin to realize that their thoughts -- not a prescribed topic's narrow confines -- are what matter. I can't begin to tell you what this does for a student's voice and intellectual confidence!"
And instilling that confidence should really be the ultimate goal of any educator.
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