EdTechTESOL

One of the great failures of blogging in the classroom is that the blogs rarely extend beyond the semester. Why is this?

I think that most teachers underestimate the blogging process and simply think that students will just do it without proper scaffolding and guidance. This is a great failure, as what this turns into is a simple journal activity done online, which completely ignores the greater possibilities of a learning blog. Why not introduce students to the full blogging cycle of reading -> commenting -> posting -> discussing?

Students need to be made aware of the benefits of reaching out and reading other blogs as resources of information, sources of discussion and ideas. They must learn to comment to start discussions with other authors before posting on their own. They should know what is out there before adding to the discussion in their own blogs, so that they know where to start. Teachers need to provide the required scaffolding to walk the students through this process before allowing them to jump in too quickly. Too often new tools fall by the wayside simply because we are not shown how to use them properly… With proper guidance, students will be able to create their own social networks around their blogs, benefit from collaboration and discussion with other, and take more control over their own learning environment…

I have come across two great resources this week about how to set up blogging in the classroom, and I highly recommend checking them out if you are looking to kickstart your students’ learning blogs. It could make the difference between your students blogging because “they have to” and blogging because “they want to”…

First, check out the post “Blogging: It Isn’t About Writing” over at The Four Eyed Technologist. This is a great post about the cycle of blogging and gives some great tips on how to properly scaffold the process in your classroom. Next, take a click over to the presentation page for “Sustained Blogging in the Classroom” by Jeff Utecht. He also has a wiki page set up on the topic. Jeff gives a 23 minute presentation on blogging in the classroom that will really help you set up your classroom for blogging success. The video download is a bit heavy at 291MB, but well worth it.

Image credits: Rosino on Flickr

I just came across a great link to a wiki page about 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. This is a great resource for teachers looking to find a way for students to create their own stories or presentations online. The wiki page gives a link to 50 demonstrations of the same story using different Web 2.0 tools. The author, Alan Levine, gives brief summaries of each tool and links to examples of each. Out of the 50 he demonstrated, I have at least nine that I want to follow up on…

Check out his wiki. There seem to be a lot of other great pages there as well…

Via: Alvin’s Educational Technology Blog

Educators worldwide seem to have latched on to social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl and others, but why not take it a step further? Personally, I like to take a look through the links of others in my network, but sometimes the plain links don’t tell the whole story. Why did they save that link? What is special about it? What do they think about it? These questions all pass through my mind as I view these links, and it makes me wish that these services offered “discuss this” links. Sure, I could simply email my comments and/or questions, but why not have that built in? Wouldn’t that put a little more ’social’ in social bookmarking?

So this is why my interest was peaked when I saw that my hosting service added a new “one-click install” to the Goodies section. The new software is Pligg, and it is an open source Digg clone. I couldn’t resist, so I decided to install the program to see how hard it is to set up and get running. As I write this now, I am still waiting for the “one-click install” to complete. Any moment now…

Before deciding to give Pligg a try, I did to a quick search for social bookmarking sites specifically for educators, but I did not find much. One interesting site is Edtags.org, which seems to be the work of a doctoral student at Harvard. It is interesting, but seems to be for the use of Harvard students and staff only. Perhaps this is only while they work out the system? I was surprised though as their seems to be little “social” activity on the site currently. They claim over 500 users, but the articles with the highest “votes” only seem to have around three! I was also unable, in my brief search, to find an article that had been commented on. The site seems to be a work in progress, and you can get more details from their blog. I will probably keep an eye on this one, as it would be interesting if they opened it up beyond the Harvard community.

In the meantime, I guess I will just be playing with Pligg, as I would love to see a fully functioning Digg-type site specifically for educators…

Do you think that educators would use such a tool? The Edtags site does seem to lack in the actual social interaction aspect. They have the communication tools built-in and available, and they are certainly sharing links, but are they discussing them? Are they interacting in any real way? After all, without the communication aspect, why not just share a del.icio.us account? Don’t get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for their work, I am just curious why so little discussion seems to evolve from the sharing…