Week 11: Final reflection on the value and use of blogs in the senior biology classroom.

Module Focus: 8.3 Patterns in Nature

I found writing this blog each week to be a challenging experience (much harder that blogs I have had to write for other courses). I definately found it difficult to find the time and patience to sit down and write something constructive, but the blog provided the structure and timeframe to force me to be more disciplined and formal with my engagement with the course content while still providing freedom for my own personal learning preferences and inquiry into the topic.

Writing this blog has cemented my thought that they can defnately play some role in providing and shaping learning opportinities for students. However, these need to be planned programms and structures and not simply "kids start a blog and write something in it each week". One of the real strengths of a blog for students is the development of the 'try to leave class with 1 thing you have learnt' concept that I have seen teachers try intermittently during prac. This is very hard to keep on top of as a teacher, but I think using a blog here might be one good way to implement them. I would consider assigning the last 20 minutes of the last class of the week for the students to write about one idea or concept that interested them that week. I would leave it open to help engage then with whatever part of that weeks work appealed to them.

Having to reply to others' blogs was also a really good idea. It allowed me to see what other people found interesting and see a number of different ideas, approaches, and resources that I would not have seen by myself. I would incorporate this peer review into any student blog activity I ran.

There's plenty of other sources out there that support these ideas too. They range from accademic literature, to teacher websites to youtube clips with adorable kids (just to butter you up) or cartoons (this one is a really good introduction)