Module 2 - Using Blogs in the Classroom

According to the article by Wang & Fang (2005) some of the advantages of blogs in an educational setting is that students can work in a small cooperative group towards a shared learning goal. Students are able to share their ideas, enhance their communication skills and expand their knowledge.


Previously to this course I have never been involved in blogging nor have I ever used a blog for my courses that I teach, but I can definitely see how using a webblog may be used in my course to assess the students understanding and ability to apply course concepts. I may consider using this in place of my one minute assessments. The following link gives an example of the one minute assessments that I currently use and I can see how this could easily be incorporated into a blog assessment.
http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/telc/documents/programinformation/doc/all/assessment%20-%20oneminute/assessment-oneminute.doc



Wang & Fang did not really discuss disadvantages of the weblogs, probably because the purpose of the article was to “explore the benefits of cooperative learning.” The authors did state however that the “quality of interaction of online communication needs to be assessed.” I believe that this is a crucial point! Students could easily lose focus of the main topic. They also stated that face-to-face class interaction was needed to foster and enhance students’ learning. They stated that further research could be into how the teacher’s role could be improved to promote benefits of weblogs.