I have used Blogger in the past for a class assignment. I did not have the students set up their own blog, however. I have instead set up my own blog that posed discussion questions for the students that they were then required to respond to.
I like Blogger because of its ease of use. It is very easy to set-up and modify, and my students in the past have caught onto it very quickly.
The first year that I used Blogger, I experimented with having the students set up their own blog and then they were to respond to a given number of other students blogs for the grade. I liked this because it allowed students greater control over the information that they were learning. The biggest problem, though, was that many of the students used their blogging account inappropriately and they, at times, left negative comments for other students. It required a great deal of follow-up on my part to monitor the student posts. Additionally, some of the students didn't properly set-up their blog so it was available to the entire world. This drew some innappropriate commentary from people not affiliated with the school on some of the blogs before I was able to help the students set it as private.
This year, I intend to use our school's blog that is 100% hosted on our school server. Only members of our learning community will have access to the blog, and it will give me the best of both worlds: students will be more in control of their learning experience and I will be able to more easily monitor the student responses.
I like Blogger because of its ease of use. It is very easy to set-up and modify, and my students in the past have caught onto it very quickly.
The first year that I used Blogger, I experimented with having the students set up their own blog and then they were to respond to a given number of other students blogs for the grade. I liked this because it allowed students greater control over the information that they were learning. The biggest problem, though, was that many of the students used their blogging account inappropriately and they, at times, left negative comments for other students. It required a great deal of follow-up on my part to monitor the student posts. Additionally, some of the students didn't properly set-up their blog so it was available to the entire world. This drew some innappropriate commentary from people not affiliated with the school on some of the blogs before I was able to help the students set it as private.
This year, I intend to use our school's blog that is 100% hosted on our school server. Only members of our learning community will have access to the blog, and it will give me the best of both worlds: students will be more in control of their learning experience and I will be able to more easily monitor the student responses.
I also think that blogger is easy to use. I have tried using edublogs in the past and have gotten very frustrated with having a hard time setting up usernames for my students and them being able to post on my blogs.
ReplyDeleteI really like the formatting of your posts. I like the use of numbering to organize ideas, and the use of white space to separate thoughts. I used the traditional indenting, but learned that blogger doesn't keep that when the post is uploaded, so I posted a sea of print to read. Thanks for the terrific model!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your experiences with blogger. I am afraid that students would use the blog in a negative way too. How did you address those students? Also, I like the idea of having a school blog. Does your IT department set it up for you? Is much different than blogger?
ReplyDeleteI appreciate you sharing how you've used blogger in the past and some troubles that arose. In regards to the negative comments, I'm wondering if it would be helpful to provide clear expectations and consequences for use and misuse of this tool. I think already having a plan in place and sharing that with students would hopefully eliminate some of that. But I do agree, you would have to follow-up and monitor every student's blog to ensure only supportive or constructive responses. It would probably be a little easier on the teacher to have one main blog and have students post, share, collaborate on that. However, maintaining their own blog will enable them to reach those higher order thinking skills. Thanks for sharing!
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