Student Reflective Blogs

Because of my study program, I am not currently enrolled in a portal task. Although I do volunteer in a classroom one day a week, I am very limited as to what I can do with the class. I really think that student use of Blogs as a tool for reflection could be very useful - If the entire class has access to the required technology. In an ideal world it would be a perfect way for learners to relfect either at the end of a lesson, at the end of each day, or at the end of each week. I initially had the idea that the blogs, as a reflective tool, could be used not by themselves, but each reflection could be guided by the learning manager so that each post uses a different reflective technique - for example the first post might use a KWL (Know, Want to know, Learnt), the second one might be a PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting) as the framework for learning reflection, and so on (Frangenheim, 2007). This way, learners are not only engaged in the reflecyion because they are using a favoured medium, they are also engaged in thinking and are learning and useing a variety of thinking/reflective skills. After a semester of learning how to use different strategies learners can then have the freedom to choose the most appropriate strategy to make a reflective posting.

The other idea I had was that learners could use the blogs in pairs or groups of three as a Science Journal where they can post the resukts, conclusions and discussion of their investigations. By doing this, not only the teacher can use an RSS feed to view their learners work, but learners can use an RSS feed to view each others results and compare them without having to have every group present to the class (which takes a fair bit of time). This can prompt further discussions and further investigations.

These are just two of the ways I would like to try to use a blog in the classroom. I am sure there are hundreds of other possibilities. Feel free to comment with any other ideas you may have!