Does Blogging really make a difference?

The focus question:

Can blogs be used as a vehicle to show evidence of student learning?

Participating Teachers: Glen/Candy

STEP 1 – Collect Baseline Data

Student Achievement:Students complete a surveyQuestions:

What tools are you presently using to make postings on your blog? Why are you using these tools? Can blogging help you develop your learning?

Teacher Practice dataCurrently we have class blogs and students have individual blogs. The major uses for our class blogs are to direct students to a variety of teaching sites and for posting samples of student work using a range of web tools. We are not using the blogs consistently to show evidence of student learning.

Student Voice – We will have discussions with our classes around the use of blogs and record the results.Questions:

What is the primary use for your blog? What do you post on your blog? How difficult do you find making posts on your blogs? How has if effected your learning? How could we improve blogging in our class to use these as a learning tool? Do you add posts to your blog at home that are centred around your learning?

STEP 2 Analyse data– Week 5

We will add links to professional readings here. STEP 3 Set an Action Plan for how you intend to move forward and enhance learning for both teacher/students.Carry out your Action Plan between weeks 6- 11, Term 2. We will make regular postings on our blog that will reflect our findings.

STEP 4 End of Term 2 – evaluate this trial and make suggestions for other staff within our school on how they could incorporate your findings into their classes.Evaluating will mean you need to collect data again – identical to baseline data.

STEP 5 So what??

Now you will need to prepare a 5min presentation about your findings – this will be presented to the staff via a visual display (data projector, PowerPoint, Movie it’s up to you) in Term 4, 2010.

Teacher Practice Data

Teacher practice data can be collected in a variety of ways – remember how you collect it needs to be easy and effective, so carefully choose your method. Simply recording conversations with pen and paper may be quite sufficient at first. Other methods can include:

- Sound recordings of conversations- Video recordings of class discussions- Video recordings of your answers to these questions

What kinds of practice am I currently using? How effective are these?(Collect data over a 5-10min session, over 2 separate sessions).

Student achievement Data

Student achievement data can be collected in a variety of ways – remember how you collect it needs to be easy and effective, so carefully choose your method. Simply recording conversations with pen and paper may be quite sufficient at first. Other methods can include:

- Sound recordings of conversations- Video recordings of class discussions- Video recordings of individual student performances

It is important that you graph your baseline/post data to make it easier for you and others to interpret.

Student Achievement data

Student Learning data

Student voice

Student voice can be collected in a variety of ways – remember how you collect it needs to be easy and effective, so carefully choose your method. Remember your 1st, 2nd conversations with students around their learning may be slow, hard going and seem unfruitful – but it is essential. Building a culture of trust and mutual respect for learning is vital to healthy discussion around how students learn best

Have discussions with your class around these questions and record the results.

How does your teacher ………………………..?