Communigations

Blog in the classroom

So my little experiment is running for one month now. I'll recall what it's all about: I set up a blog for my father to use in one of his classes. The group exists of nine students. The age of the students is approximately 16 and they're educated in five years to go to colleges of higher education (for the Dutch: HAVO). The group that uses the weblog is in it's fourth year, the pre-exam year. The subject for the blog is mathematics.

The way the blog is used: the teacher has published an algebra problem that needs to be solved in a number of steps. It is the task of the students to collectively come up with a solution for the problem. Their participation on the blog will be taken into account for grading, as well as the quality of their solutions.

Before the students started to use the blog I asked them to fill out a questionnaire about the way the normally to their homework and their expectations of this experiment. Here's a quick summary of the students' answers:

the students normally to their homework alone

the students do ask a fellow student to help them if they can't solve a problem, but most of them do that only sometimes

most of the students wait with asking questions until the officially scheduled lessons

most of the students think that the amount of scheduled hours is too small to learn all the required material

they haven't participated in such a project before (where they have to produce a solution for a problem 'at a distance')

most of the students have no problem with sharing their answers with fellow students

only two (out of nine) students feel a bit scary of publishing something on the internet

most of the students think by using the weblog it's easier to ask the teacher something

most of the students don't know whether the use of a weblog will help them understand the math's problem and solution

So far the results from the questionnaire. In a few conversations with my father I asked him about his observations on the experiment. I'll sum them up:

the students seem to like the experiment

in the beginning the solutions came pretty quickly (they seemed eager to post)

some of the students come up with a solution together (they sign the comment with multiple names)

the teacher has good insight in the mistakes the students make

the way the students work becomes more clear for the teacher

the blog enables a different way of communicating through student and teacher, different than use of other ICT-applications. This experiment integrates the use of the computer more with the classes

although some students work together on solving the problem, the students don't really look into the solutions others come up with.

the students are not critical towards each other, they are not correcting one another.

I'm interested whether the last two observations will change during the year. It is obvious that the students are not used to collaborative working. They do their homework alone and there is one-sided communication during the classes. The teacher tells them what the solutions should have been. There is not much of a dialogue between students about the things they learn. It would be interesting to see whether it is the case for all subjects in school, but on the questionnaire they all say that they do all their homework alone.

At the end of December I will have a group discussion with the students in order to get more input from the students. The outcomes of that discussion will be published here. Let me know if you have any questions or remarks regarding this experiment!

Permalink | TrackBack (by Elmine Wijnia on November 25, 2004 11:47 AM)

Comments

Hello! I'm from Brasil and came here through bloglines. I speak english but not so well to write a blog in english. However, I am talking about this experiment in my blog, to reach brazilian teachers. Most of them don't know whether the use of a weblog can help in their classrooms.
As you do, I recently finished Master Degree. My dissertation (here we call this way. We use thesis to PHD)is about the insertion of technologies in the work of teachers in a critical approach. For this, I use weblogs (you can see the colaborative weblog in http://planeta.terra.com.br/educacao/Gutierrez/blogs/zapt/). My dissertation is online,but is in portuguese. If you translate you thesis in english I'll be happy to know :)
best regards,
Su

Posted by: Suzana at December 5, 2004 01:25 PM

Hi Elmine,
As a part-time teacher I am using blogs in teaching 18 to 25 year olds in 2 different schools. I am very interested in discussing things that we learn about learning from using this interface/ collabortion tool.

In June when my course finishes I will do an extensive evaluation with my students. If you like I will send it to you.
Ciao, Antoinette

Posted by: antoinette at March 26, 2005 02:33 PM

Thanks Antoinette, I would love to recieve your evaluation. I'm very curious what the outcome will be!

Posted by: Elmine at March 27, 2005 06:13 PM