The first barrier which seems obvious to me is the whether or not the blog is easy to use. We have seen just in our discussion this week, the problems with people understanding how to post and then technical problems once a person has posted. Lai and Chen (2010) identified ease of use and the time it takes to learn the technology as two of the barriers to secondary teachers adopting teaching blogs. (p. 958) Anthor factor which they identified was that it can be very time consuming for teachers to keep track of posts and provide detailed answers or information back to students promptly (Lai and Chen, 2010, p. 954).
I'm curious to know from those of you who may have used blogs if you found these factors to be challenging. And, if so, did you have strategies to over come them?
Cheers, Mary
I don't think it takes a lot of time to set the blogs up. Our Year 4, 5 and 6 students have set them up quickly and are adding confidently. The key is also in us sharing the learning and teaching - often the students are more quick to adopt the technology and explore and use it - and they are also able to teach us! :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree that it takes time to comment on the blogs and it depends on the teacher's pedagogical beliefs about effective feedback. I've found that the feedback I give provides feedforward and steps towards next learning. The blog also provides ongoing assessment that is in a more relevant context than just in a book. (The feedback comes from others as well as me - wider audience can encourage higher standards and more effort being put into the posts).
One way I get around the time factor is to have a routine of commenting on 5 blogs a night. That way the students know that they need to have work finished by a certain time. I'm not sure how this would work with assignments at the secondary level. I've added a couple of blogs for people to have a look at - secondary ones.
Blogs are very simple and quick to use once people are familiar with the layout of them. Like anything, I guess it just takes time to familiarise yourself with them - you also would need to believe in the purpose and use for them. :-) Remember back when we all started using computers? For those of us of a certain generation - ;-)
ReplyDeletePosts can be as detailed or simple as needed depending on the purpose of them.