Blogging Techniques & Tactics
Make It Fit Your Pedagogy
Instructional blogging works best when it is directly related to a specific pedagogy. In classes where blogs were created for students but there was no direct assignment or reason to use the blogs, students quickly lost interest and did not use their blogs. Assessment data has attested to students wanting to know that others are reading their entries.
Encourage Participation
Ways to engage students in writing on course blogs range from developing assignments that are written on a course or individual blog to requiring students to comment on other students entries. One way to realize this successfully is to specify in the syllabus that students are expected to make two or three comments to other students entries and that these comments should expand on our collective knowledge. There is a risk that unless students have guidelines on appropriate ways to comment, they will drop short statements that contribute little.
Instructors and professors who comment on student blogs, particularly the first few weeks of a semester, may find better student contributions as the semester progresses.
Brand the Blog To Your Department
One of the ways that we customize the blogs hosted by the Learning Technology Center is to add a banner to the homepage that features the department or college. This brands the blog for that academic unit rather than the LTC or something more generic. These banners range from simple text images created in Photoshop, to images including a department's logo, to attractive banner images created by a blog's author.
Adapting Instructional Blogging To Large Classes
Teaching a Gen ed course with as many as 200 students? If your Gen Ed course has honors students in the course who must do an honors project, have them do it on a blog and ask the rest of the students to comment on the honor's students entries.
Blogging Without Active Professorial Direction
In classes where the professor is not actively engaged in blogging, we have found that blogging will work better if the blogs are maintained by a small percentage of the class selected by the professor. You can expect that some students will accept ownership of blogs, some will comment, and others will only lurk.
Blogging As Part Of A Simulation Exercise
Blogging works particularly well as one component of an online simulation in which blogs represent media outlets that are the basic public sphere of a game environment. The need to know what is going on in the game, and the need to publicize and spread propaganda make the blogs more than just a place for exchanging of opinions.
