A teacher reflects on blogging as a teaching tool

Leslie Whitaker, a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee posted her recent experiences with using blogs as a teaching tool to The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog today.  She had her students blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama's address during the memorial service for the people killed at Fort Hood earlier this week.  She gave them 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they'd written.  The results impressed her.

Here is an expert of some of the responses her students gave:

One student, who had family members in the military, wrote a prose poem that started every line with "I hate", including one line, "I hate that my brother lost six years of his life in the Army."

Another student wrote "I have never witnessed the horrors of a murder. To the best of my knowledge, neither has anyone I know. I cannot approximate nor rationalize nor understand the emotions involved, and pretending otherwise seems false. So I am detached."

What Ms. Whitaker reflected was that by hearing her students' reactions as they shared with each other, made the experience of watching the president's address far more meaningful than if she had watched it with her family or by herself.   She also felt that her class was able to give voice to the videly divergent views that exist in our country.


She closed by posing the following questions: 

• Is this what blogging at its best offers us as a society, the chance to put the various slivers of reaction to any complex problem side by side? Or is the process I stumbled upon simply a standard educational model of requiring students to think, write, and then discuss? 
• Was 10 minutes too short a time to process a reaction to such a complicated situation? Or is 10 minutes longer than we usually get?"

Here are my responses to her questions:

• I do think that blogging offers us as a global community to put our reactions to complex situations side by side.  That's one of the great powerfulness that blogs and micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, allow us to do is respond in a rapid manner as news happens
• I think 10 minutes was long enough.  It gave enough time to think it over with too much time to over-analyze it.  Would her students have been so brutally honest given more time?
  

 What do you think? I encourage you my readers to post your responses as a comment.

The Role of Blogs in Education

While blogs are not new in education (they've been on the scene since 2004), their role like all instructional technologies is constantly evolving.

Two of the leaders (in my opinion, at least) in using blogs in education, Will Richardson and Anne Davis, have had lots to say over the years on how to effectively use blogs in education.

Anne has worked with a variety of ages and subject areas as well as presenting at national conferences. In her presentation at the 2004 NECC Conference, she lists dozens of possiblities that fall into 5 main categories, using blogs to enhance learning, using blogs to distribute classroom information, using blogs as a professional development tool to reflect on their teaching, having students create blogs to express themselves creatively and finally using a shared blog to work collaboratively.

Several years after her initial presentation in 2004, she shared a Lessons learned post that was a result from a NECC Panel Discussion as well as her own experiences. She emphasizees how blogs can help create a feeling of ownership and control over the curriculm for students. In addition to Anne's list of lessons, Will also posted his own list, and the biggest thing I took away from his post was that"blogging is thinking", that and "blogs take work".

Having at least one personal blog, that I try and post to occasionally I can relate to the blogs take work, but they are also such a great resource. I'm looking forward to regularly posting and seeing what conversations can develop. I'd love to hear your comments on how you view the role of blogs in education.