A New Venue for Discussion

When beginning my blog “Ms. Clausen’s Classroom,” I really didn’t know what I was getting myself in to. It seemed to take me forever to learn what could be done with the blog page and still today, over a year later, I’m finding new things about Blogmeister all the time (especially since beginning this class).

One way that I’ve used my blog is a place to continue classroom conversations. Some of my students (16-18 years-old) have been successful with the weekly posts. These students are better able to vocalize his/her opinion without feeling the pressure or self-consciousness that comes with sharing opinions in class. This year I am having students respond to classmates’ post, just as we do in this venue and the class “Discussion Board.” I hadn’t even thought of having students respond to his/her classmates until beginning my education at Walden. The response, ask questions, and comment component of the blog assignments challenges students to actually read his/her classmates posts. Posting a response to what he/she read allows students to actively think about what was posted. He/she learns to respond in an appropriate, respectful, and constructive manner. On the other side of the exchange, once a student receives questions and comments this stretches his/her thinking and faces the challenge of responding to further develop the previous ideas.

Assigning blogging assignments to students in elective classes (psychology, sociology, law and society, etc.) proved to be successful. All the students’ posts written throughout the past semesters are still available for viewing.

When I tried this with my sophomores (15-16 years-old) last year I found that the majority of these students didn’t remember to post or posted less-than quality work. The lack of blogging was destroying students’ history grades. Finally, I recognized that this type of instructional tool wasn’t right for my history students so I reconfigured the students’ grades, the blogging was put on hold, and I chalked-up blogging with my sophomore history students as a learning experience.