Blogging as a teaching tool: Part 2

(For Part 1, see posting of June 5, 2008)

After six weeks of blogging, the Oral/Interpersonal classes had to give a reflection presentation and the Written class had to write a reflection paper. Only two of the 60+ students were negative. The rest raved. The primary comment was how they enjoyed reading a viewpoint that was miles away from their own. One student said she hated one of the assignments and couldn’t understand it. She kept reading it over and over—and suddenly she "got" it. She beamed as she described what it felt like to her to understand something she thought was beyond her. Other students reported starting their own blogs, subscribing to various feeds from the assigned sites, and said they appreciated that they could now interact professionally on the web.

The reflections also required that they give me suggestions on how to improve the assignments. Once I teach again (probably this fall), I plan on implementing all of their suggestions. These were:

• They suggested there be two weeks of getting used to signing in, writing comments, and reading BEFORE having graded blog-assignments.
• I would post the week’s assignment on Sunday morning, and it was due the next Saturday at midnight. Way too generous, and some of them thought they had to do the work just on Sunday (I'm not sure why they figured that). Next time I will have it run from some time on Monday and have the assignment due at 5 p.m. on Friday.
• My rubrics with my comments and their grades didn’t have the assignment numbers or topic titles, which confused them (and me). This was a problem at the end when they wanted to look back at the assignments and couldn’t tell which was which.
• They wanted to do it for longer than six weeks—they felt they were just getting going.
  
  

In the future, I will expand the blogging aspect of my classrooms to at least 12 weeks. I had an extra credit blogging assignment, but I was not impressed by the results. I probably won’t use it again as a vehicle for extra credit. Although my classes were face-to-face, I think one could use blogging in an online class. This is because the online work is private, so the public presentation of themselves in a professional manner is still valuable through the medium of a blog. One of my professors in graduate school tried using a wiki as an additional tool for the online class, but I think a blog works better. You can visit the two blog sites by going to View my complete profile, scrolling down, and selecting either Erica’s Communication Class or Erica’s Writing Class.