Action Research: Blogging in Education

Both planned and unexpected outcomes resulted from this project, including the development of tools and a model to help educational communities assess the value or risk associated with blogging in education. Any of these or the whole model are available to help an educational community come to a collaborative decisions based on increased awareness, greater understanding, and reflection about the roles that blogs (and other social software) should or should not play in teaching and learning. Each of the outcomes provided valuable information that helped provide answers to the 3 questions posed in this project.

Q1 What value can blog tools and the blogging process bring to teaching and learning?

Q2 Who has concerns related to the use of blog tools and blogging process for teaching and learning (and what are they)?

Q3 What process would facilitate a collaborative decision by an educational community about the role blog tools and blogging should/could or should not play in teaching and learning?

The 10 top outcomes for this project are belFor a full report, including graphs and charts of any of the outcomes below, email Lucie and she'll send you the full report.

1. Identifying pedagogical beliefs that can be supported by blogging tools and software.

2. A searchable annotated collection of resources about blogging organized categories (created using a tool called FURL)

3. Increased awareness of social software tools like Blogging, Furling, MyBlogLog, and SurveyMonkey and their value in an information age where knowledge management tools and skills are much needed.

4. Increased awareness and dialogue about blogging amongst Vermont educators.

5. Pre- and Post surveys provided insights about preconceptions,questions, concerns, and opportunities that educators. The surveys can also be used by educational communities who would like a tool to poll their own educational communities.

6. Student Surveys: A tool that local educators can use to gather data from their own students, or to view a sampling of student data from local middle school and high school students about blogs.

7. Two new blogs that contain information and hyperlinks about blogging in education. These two blogs provided both example of blogging tools being used to present information and “content”.

8. Data about what online resources seemed of most interest to participants and viewers of this project.

9. An Inquiry Project Design that can be used by a group or community to go through the process of Assessing their communities readiness to use blogging tools for teaching and learning in their school community.

10. Meeting of ISTE standards related to social, ethical, legal, and cultural implications of technology for Vermont Educators, Administrators, and Students who participated in an activity.

# posted by Lucie deLaBruere @ Thursday, December 15, 2005