Sunday, April 1, 2012

Blogging

After reading about the activity in the article, I felt that it would not work nearly as well in a secondary setting.  Having students who are fully capable of understanding online blogging create their own colorfully decorated paper blogs seems demeaning to me.  I would entirely skip her activity of having the students create paper blogs, and simply have my high school students create real blogs.  The only value I found in this piece were in the blogging rules and guidelines to commenting sections.  I agree that properly citing information posted on blogs and avoiding plagiarism should be serious concerns when having students create their own blogs.  I also agree that it must be made explicit that any form of cyber bullying or harassment will not be tolerated.  Finally, I agree with the point about only posting things that benefit the learning experiences of participa  ting members.  However, I would take things a step further and require my students to support their opinions with evidence found from the internet.  From my experience, blogs can be a haven for unsupported beliefs, a practice which I would not tolerate in my classroom.

2 comments:

  1. I never really thought about the activity of paper blogging as demeaning but after reading your blog post I totally get what you're saying. Students today probably know more than we do about technology and so the concept of blogging is probably second nature to them. I think that as long as they understand the seriousness of the assignment and the rules they need to follow, secondary students should have no problem with a blogging task.

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  2. I agree with you Peter. This activity resembles an introductory tool for blogging, however most secondary ed students are already accustomed to using the internet and blogs.

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