Blogging as a Thinking Apparatus

The power of blogging in the student context is as a publishing tool on the internet. Students are engaged by the idea that their work is accessible in the global community. In this context I have chosen to lead our classroom blogging experience to specifically focus on thinking skills. Through our classroom and individual student blogs we have created a community of thinkers. Using a combination of video, animation, images, quotes and discussions based around philosophical ideas blogging has been the forum for these student musings. The classroom blog leads the discussions and focuses the community of thinkers. It is also is a terrific point of entry for the wider school community to access student thoughts and activities.

The first place to go when beginning a classroom or student blog is globalstudent.org.au/. It has a wealth of information pertaining to creating and hosting blogs, best practice, interesting ideas and safety.

Having experimented with personal student blogs (online diaries) I decided to focus specifically on thinking. I used the classroom blog as a means of advertising student and classroom experience. It became a relatively detailed field of information relating to our classroom’s learning. The student’s liked it because it celebrated their work and the community liked it because it allowed family’s access to a level of school information that was previously difficult to reach. I believe the student’s were much more inclined to celebrate each others work and that it played apart in galvanizing the group.

The next and major part of blogging strategy for me was deciding the context for the individual blogs. I decided to focus on thinking, in particular philosophical reasoning. This was done via the classroom blog. The student’s were given a reference point, a story, video, quotes, website, previous experience or sometimes just abstract questions. They were asked to answer two or three questions and their blogs expanded in this way. The students would simply copy and paste the reference section and focus questions from the classroom blog into their own blogs.

The content for the thinking questions was gathered from a variety of sources. A terrific source was the Education Department’s portal for e-learning objects ‘Digilearn’ where you can search for relevant information in curriculum areas. There was a terrific collection of animations about philosophical ideas including dreaming, wanting, the mind and many others. I also gathered video material from websites, quotes from the internet, read them stories, as well as using abstract questioning to expand their ability to analyse and justify answers.

We spent around 20 minutes a week last year on the questions. With Year 4s I am taking more time to disseminate information and discuss the issues pertaining to the questions. I have also started them writing their responses before publishing to their blogs.

Web 2.0 requires an audience and responses from the audience. One of the great challengers with blogging is to create a community of bloggers and responders. The school website has been influential in creating an opening for parents of different classes and year levels to view and respond to the blogs. Once the classroom blog and student blogs are up and running it is important that many or all of the blogs link to each other so that students can easily link to other student’s work and leave comments for them. When the students receive comments they recognize the kinetic nature of blogging and its significance grows.

A logical next step for this blogging would be to share this thinking process with other classrooms locally and globally and create a broad community of thinkers. This would broaden the community, expanding the responding and increase interest in the publishing of work, as Web 2.0 tools should be hoping to achieve.

Blogging is a terrific means of assessment in many areas of the curriculum. It lends itself to all areas of writing assessment depending on the process you follow regarding drafting/editing/publishing/etc.
Through the use of thinking blogs you can assess in all areas of Thinking Processes including reasoning, processing and inquiry, creativity and reflection, evaluation and metacognition

‘A focus on the development of thinking competencies within specific areas of the curriculum not only serves as a core integrative function, it also has the potential to provide continuity in approaches to learning from P-10 and to emphasise the view that such knowledge, skills and behaviours are important to lifelong learning.’

The assessment area of ICT is covered through:
-developing new thinking and learning skills that produce creative and innovative insights.
-expressing themselves in contemporary and relevant ways.
-Communicating locally and globally to share knowledge.
-Understandings the implications of the use of ICT and their ethical responsibilities as users.

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