Making History

I ran a class blog for a few years, mostly as an online continuation of class discussions.  It worked well some of the time, for many of the students, but it did not become fully integrated into my teaching, so when we went on another push to reduce student stress by reducing homework I dropped it.  I did try again for a short period this year, but I did not put the time into it to make things work.

So as I read I am thinking about what I would really want to accomplish and how much I would need to change in order to get that done.

I loved the asynchronous discussion.  The voices that came up regularly on the blog were not always the same ones that dominated class discussion.  But it was usually the same few voices on the blog.  I liked the ability to send tangential topics to the blog — students did not feel that we had dropped something that interested them, but we did not take up too much class time with a topic that was not key to what we were doing.

As we move to laptops over the next years I think there will be better ways to work blogging into the classroom work, rather than homework.  I think the goal of more writing is always a good one.  And more shorter understanding pieces would be my preference.  I need to put more thought and research into what kind of form that writing will take.