Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students by Ruth Reynard

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/10/avoiding-the-5-most-common-mistakes-in-using-blogs-with-students.aspx
Summary: In this article the author talks about five mistakes that are common when having students do blogs in the classroom. The first mistake is not contextualizing the blog correctly, or having students not understand what a blog is for and how it will enhance their learning. In this case, the main point of the blog is for self-reflection and thought process assignments. Mistake two is unclear learning outcomes. The teacher needs to have clear learning outcomes because blogs tend to help with higher learning processes such as synthesis and analysis. Not being able to utilize this effectively with a clear learning outcome will waste a lot of potential. Mistake three is misuse of the environment. Other people can comment on blogs but they cannot contribute like they can with a wiki. It is mostly published so that students can see their classmate's thought process and have that help guide their own thought process. Mistake four is not having a clear rubric for grading. Students need a clear idea of what they need to publish in the blog in order to benefit from it and not feel like they are being arbitrarily graded. The final mistake is inadequate time allocation. The author suggests leaving blogs available to write until the course is over so students that need more time to gather their thoughts can have it.

Reaction: I am not so sure about leaving the option to blog open until the end of the course. Some students may benefit but others may just choose to leave it until the last day and that means less students will be able to benefit from reading their classmate's work. Other than that this article seems pretty solid. Reynard seems to write a lot of technology articles for some reason. I would agree that a lot of these are common mistakes with doing blogs correctly. I'm sure if I just randomly said that students should start doing blogs about a certain subject I would get some who do it correctly, others who don't post anything, and others who turn it into some type of diary. Overall I think using blogs in the classroom is a good idea for certain subjects and assignments.

Reynard, R. (2001, October 01). Avoiding the five most common mistakes in using blogs with students. Retrieved from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/10/avoiding-the-5-most-common-mistakes-in-using-blogs-with-students.aspx