Ideas to Get You Started
Here are a few basic strategies for integrating student voices into your class blog this semester.
Comments – Obviously the most familiar way to add student voices to a class blog is adding comments to a post. At the beginning of the week, the instructor or TA would create a post that includes a discussion question or prompt. Then during or between classes students would stop by to add comments to the main question or reply to the comments of others.
Question Queue: create a standing post where students can raise questions they would like to discuss in class.
Rapid Response: ask students, individually or in pairs, to contribute a 3-4 sentence position statement they will then defend or debate.
Student Posts – One way students can master new concepts is by having to teach them to others. Most blog software provides user roles for secondary contributors, so with a little preparation, students can have their own dashboard and post content as a full author to the blog. If you imagine student work more like a short essay than a single observation, then allowing students to make full posts may communicate higher expectations and value of their work.
Reading Journal: ask students to post a summary of preliminary research or more formal abstract to the blog for peer comments and critique.
Media Mashup: have students analyze appearances of course concepts in popular media by embedding a YouTube clip and then evaluating its relevance.
Post by Email – A final feature we found in many mobile blogging tools was post by email. For students and faculty with mobile devices, this provided us a simple way to share content quickly back to the class hub. Since most native apps on the iPhone offered email sharing of photos, links, and media, post by email become the common avenue connecting mobiles to the blog. (At ACU, this feature is built on a Gmail account associated with each blog and the Postie WordPress plug-in described below.)
Webliography: early in a survey course, ask students to construct a bibliography of useful study materials and web sites by emailing links with annotations to the blog.
Photo Shoot: send students into the community (or out onto the web) to capture images that reflect social attitudes toward a common topic then email them to the blog for discussion.
(New iPhone or iPod touch users may not know they can tap and hold on a web image to copy it before pasting it into an email. Remind them to cite the original source of the image, or better yet copy and paste the URL as well.)
I'm not familiar with this term "Educanto," but the article hits a concept that is close to us--assessment. If "grades" don't reflect a grasp of "basics," then what is it that we want to measure?