Article 1-Instructional Strategies for Blogging

Summary
Ruth Reynard’s article is broken into two sections really; a summary of her own research and what teachers need to know to make blogging a meaningful learning experience for their students. During her research of actual student blogs, she observed there are four main types of student responses; reflective statements, commentary statements, new idea statements, and application statements. Reynard believes that the students learning process is reflected in these statements creating the student’s individual voice of learning. The statements show that learning is not always a linear act but often students process and apply materials in their own way. She states that many students struggle with self-reflection, which leads to commentary statements making up 55% of the responses. This is well above the 10% of application statements, which shows the actual application of learning outside the classroom.
To use blogging in the classroom, Reynard emphasizes that teachers must integrate it early in the course and have the learning clearly connected to curricular aims of the course so students do not see blogging as an extra task with no learning value. Along with implementing blogging early in the course, it should run throughout providing students another avenue to review course materials, ideas, and interact with peers and instructors. This will assist in keeping students actively using their blogs until the completion of the course and provide teachers a better understanding of each student's individual learning needs. Teachers must also focus student’s attention on expanded audience of blogs and the need to pay particular attention to the construction of their writing. Once complete, grading of blogs should be based on effort related to the curricular aims of the course not number of posts. Teachers also need to be aware that blogs do pose ongoing challenges for students and themselves and must be up to the challenge of addressing them.

Reaction
I agree that many students will see blogging as busy work not truly related to a course unless a teacher purposefully identifies the purpose of blogging and possible blog entries throughout the course. On the other hand, I have a hard time excepting her findings as valid because of the small sample size and short time frame she conducted her research. I have only had one other true blogging experience in education so far and it was not self reflective in the least. I have used discussion boards extensively and these seem to be more student friendly then blogs. It will take much more experience on my part with blogging to make me feel comfortable with implementing it into my classroom.

Reynard, R. (2007). Instructional Strategies for Blogging. Campus Technology. Retrieved from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2007/05/instructional-strategies-for-blogging.aspx