Language Arts and Social Studies with Mr. Hayes
This Blog is shared with permission by the creator, Matt Hayes, a Language Arts and Social Studies teacher at the International School of Prague. In particular, check out the Curator Project, in which students were given an artifact from the Lobkowicz family collection and used their blogs to research their artifacts. Please note that the blog was in an experimental year.
Blogging for Education 
Within this group project, students were required to maintain an on-going learning log that focused on their research of a historical object as a means of recounting and developing key informational components about the societies in which the objects were produced. On a daily basis, students were required to discuss and reflect upon their research. The teacher provided guiding questions for each group to consider therefore each group’s response had the potential to be completely individualized and creative. In addition, a sample curator diary entry was presented on the blog and it served as a very good exemplar of what was expected of students. Overall I believe that the blog, and this project furthermore, is a very good example of how blogs can be used to effectively enhance critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity within the language arts and social studies classroom.
I agree with your perspective that this blog nurtures the 4Cs in students. I also wonder how students would be able to take what they want into a standardized exam environment. Although that is not the best form of assessment, but it is still what most educational institutes are assessing students with. What would the students be expected to know? Are they going to be tested on everything that has been discussed? That has always been a worry for me when I was a student, as I was still playing catch up in my English skills. Giving me straight text, I could memorize it and spend time understanding it, because I know where it would end. However, given a blog that keeps growing and growing would seem daunting.
Excuse me for playing the devil’s advocate for a bit here 🙂
Sherman
Sherman, it’s interesting how people learn differently. I have always struggled with paragraphs to memorize! The experience of the group was that students knew a great deal more about the time period from researching their objects and helping one another than they would have from studying a textbook. I would describe it as embodied knowing because the objects create a deeper sense of what it was like to live then: political issues, cultural trends, current technologies, social hierarchies, and interaction across cultures. In addition, the experience gave them the opportunity to develop collaboration, critical thinking and research skills.
I was captivated by the Curator Project, and truly enjoyed reading some of the student blogs, particularly “Maya” and her quest to find the origins of the fancy silk purse!
Based on the characteristics of the 4Cs, I would would consider the blog to be a good example of how blogging can enhance teaching and learning.
Creativity: Using the blog to communicate with students (the teacher) and with each other helps the students pursue their interests, and find the new info on these interests. Students are motiated to take leadership of their own learning.
Critical Thinking: Having the students post regularly on their research and progress in blog form helps them to order their thinking, interpret what they have learned and reflect critically on learning experiences and processes . As an example, in his blog, Robert reflected that he didn’t really spend as much time at his research as he should have, but he attributed it to a lack of interest in his artifact (a tulip vase).
Communication: Using the blog, students are able to communicate with Mr. Hayes and each other. In their individual blogs, the students honed their written communication skills, and showed examples of learning how to write for different audiences (classmates vs teacher). A variety of purposes for writing can also be viewed, such as informing others of their results, and persuading them as to the value of the proects.
Collaboration: This would be one area where I think this blog project is lacking. After viewing many of the student, blogs, I couldn’t find any blog posts where another student had commented. Reading through some of the posts, it was obvious that there was a great deal of collaboration within the projects (such as the Curator Project), but that there was little to no collaboration within the blog itself.
Smiles, Kim
Excellent posts and analysis. As teachers what additional guidance could we give the students so that they would be motivated to put more thought into collaboration within each other’s blogs?
Greg Campbell
To ensure collaboration among groups, students could be awarded points based on forming constructive peer feedback. The common phrase, “Does this count towards my mark?” is often brought up by my students. In many cases, educators intend for the tools to be used as assessments “for” learning rather than “of” learning therefore explicitly teaching students how to respond and provide feedback that will be useful to their peers could be advantageous within such a setting.
I agree Dani. Being expliicit about the collaboration being part of assessment really does work – doesn’t it?. Even in our MET courses!!
However I’ll be a devil’s advocate. I am not sure blogs once established very specifically support collaboration – unless you add other tools to them eg forums. It feels like blog space is more individual, a place for reflection, collection and communication and less a place for collaboration. So blogs can be the result of a collaboration but not readily a tool for collaboration for the “readers”?
When blogs are developed by a group my experience so far has been that the blog isn’t used as a collaboration tool in the intial phases of concept and development of a presentation, but can act as a more a collaborative tool as the site is being constructed.
Denise
Points are an interesting idea, and might motivate students to model the behaviour to get points. Maybe from that they would see the benefits and adopt the behaviour. I wonder, though, how to make collaboration between the bloggers within the blogs more clearly beneficial so that the students would be motivated to do it because they see it as a good way to develop their learning.
Hi Dani,
I agree that it’s more beneficial for students that tools be used as assessments for learning. Few people are experts on any topic in grade school. Learning about all topics is a work in progress.
I also agree that it’s important to to teach kids how to respond with thought-out comments. Otherwise, they may not get any benefit out of reading/listening. That said, I agree with Denise below that blogs may not be the ideal site for collaboration. It certainly invites multiple two-person discussions involving the author, and on occasion a thread will form. A single class blog would make it easier for threads to form than individual student blogs. For even more collaboration, the teacher would need to be heavily involved and inviting students to provice comment and media content, for example. However, for real collaboration, a wiki might be better given that it allows for more than just discussion.
Hello Kim,
I agree that this blog site fosters the 4 c’s, and although this one specifically addresses a language arts social studies class, this form of blog could be used as a model for many subjects. This form of communication really allows students to be creative, to develop critical thinking skills and offers opportunities to collaborate as a group. This being said, like most other blog sites/activities I have seen thus far, little collaboration exists between bloggers. I think these blogging projects need to emphasize the need for bloggers to read and comment on each other’s blog. At this level, I believe educators need to facilitate blog sites to encourage students to go beyond posting their blog. Students need to be guided and encouraged to discover how responding to each other’s posts can be a fun, stimulating, and rewarding learningi experience.
I feel that blogs need to include a constructivist approach so that students/participants are encouraged to build on each other’s learning.
Marie-France
Hi Marie-France,
I wonder if there would have been more collaboration if the posts hadn’t been so long. By writing shorter posts, the kids may have had more time to comment on their classmates’ material. Of course, that means that the original posts might be less rich in ideas. This leads me to think that collaboration may not have been the goal here… I think writing was. If that’s the case, then the class seems to have done really well because a lot of the posts are very well written, organized and deep. When I was at that age, I never would have written so much material at a time!
Thanks, Kim. The issue of collaborating within the blog is challenging. One additional challenge for these blogs is that students are in the same classes together! So a lot of the collaboration that took place was oral and not recorded in the blogs. One way to enhance the within-blog collaboration would be to run the project with students who aren’t in the same physical space.
The Curator Project truly exemplifies an authentic learning experience as well as the 4 Cs. Continuing that experience by having students use a blog format to create an e-portfolio to chronicle their individual learning journey is an excellent way to continue the authentic experience. However, I don’t think that the student blogs fully leveraged the capabilities of blogs and as a result, failed to highlight the 4Cs.
I enjoyed my own journey through the available student blogs and learned more and more about the project as I read through the various essays and reflections. I think my favourite was “Hiroki’s Blog”. It was through his writing that I learned the most about the various tasks associated with the project and found myself wondering why so many of these tasks were not featured on the student blogs. For example, all of the blogs focused on an object, yet not one of the blogs I looked at had an image featuring this object. Also, all of the student groups did a presentation on their object – these could have been filmed and posted to their blogs as well.
In regards to the 4 C’s, I think the blog use in this project was most effective in promoting critical thinking. The student reflections demonstrated a high level of critical thinking in regards to students considering their own learning processes. Communication and Collaboration were minimal as the blogs had very few comments. As for Creativity, it seems that all the students followed a pretty similar format in their tasks for the blogs.
As this project was an experiment, I hope that Mr. Hayes does his own reflecting and considers more ways to incorporate the affordances of blogs into the project and use them for more than simply a public space for text.
gillian
This blog is a good example and embodyment of the 4 Cs. It is easy to see that there is a lot of group interactions in the Curator Project, however this must have been done offline since there is a lack of communication shown online. Also, the learning activity has definitly been turned in to a personal activity for the students as you can tell by the depth and amount of time and effort they have put into their final project. By reading some of the final reflections by the students on the students also displayed many instances of critical thinking and communication. I feel that Mr. Hayes has done an excellent job of using his blog to enhance student learning rather than as a repository for information, and perhaps with this experiment completed he will be able to expand and enhance the area’s that were weak according to the 4 Cs.
Having my personal sceptisism about the effectivness of using blogs in the classroom, I am really wondering about how Mr. Hayes intends to assess the work produced by the students and whether or not the marking rubric has been supplied to the students, I tried to find it on the blog but couldn’t locate it. Also, whether the students learn from the project as effective as they would have by another manner, if we are putting all our eggs in one basket and students fail to learn effectively through the blog medium, what happens then? My final issue, is that if this Curator Project has been designed as a solution to several areas of the curriculum that has been prescribed, now that all these projects are on the internet how does a teacher combat the possibility of plagerism without taking the time to redesign another major overarching project?
Kenton
Kenton,
I was left with many of the same questions – essentially what is done outside of the blog environment to complement the work in the blog? It is clear that there is learning, conversation, and general knowledge sharing going on within the blog environment, but it is difficult to know exactly how these aspects align with things in a class or other environment. It is possible that a lot of the elements we are ‘missing’, including expanding discussions and assessment, are happening elsewhere, outside of the blog sphere!
It would be interesting to fill in these gaps.
-Meggan
Interesting observations, Kenton. These blogs were developed with the intention of supporting classroom learning, and a great deal of the learning and discussion takes place in class, and yes, there are rubrics and assessment criteria. As for plagiarism, because groups get new objects every year, this is not an issue. Students are encouraged to review research from previous years in order to support their own research.
On a philosophical level, I love the idea of blogging with my students and I tried it a few years back in my Grade 12 Media class. Unfortunately, our board decided that a new policy with respect to the use of the Internet was required for teachers. It stated that all teachers must provide their passwords and logins to the administration of the school if they were to use the Internet for any school related purposes. I found this a complete invasion of privacy and thus abandoned blogging with my classes. We tried to set up Moodle at our school, but there were so many hoops to jump through and limitations, almost everyone bailed on that too. This past semester, I taught a dual credit program with a local college and we tried to use its LMS, which had blogging built in. The network had it blocked and it was weeks before we could get access. Needless to say, I bailed on that too.
Anyway, with respect to this particular blog, I like the creativity involved. This is such a clever use of resources and I wish I was a student doing this project. The collaborative part to me seems more like all are working towards a collective goal. The critical thinking part seems to be embedded into all steps. It seems like a nice fit with historical method and such.
Overall, I like the way he uses his blog and I only wish my board was a little more receptive to using them…sigh…so many hoops to jump through.
I think this blog embodies the 4 C’s quite well while providing a class with a variety of topics and interesting sites to visit. The idea of blogging both as a means of clarifying certain teaching points (i.e. when to use a or an with “h” at the beginning of a word) or as an option for presenting a project (i.e. the Curator Project) is one with immense potential. Personally, I use a blog and online discussions in blog format with all of my classes. It is interesting to see the different approach taken by another teacher and to observe the success they have found with this approach.
My concern with a blog of this size would be that students potentially become overwhelmed and can lose focus as not every topic is likely to hold their interest at the same level. I wonder whether Mr. Hayes requires participation in each topic/post or what his blog requirements are overall. With so many posts and such a variety of topics, are any of the ideas given enough time, depth, or instruction? I am sure that other elements support this blog, making it a unique addition to education, but at the same time I can see the possibility of becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume.
Thanks, Meggan. The challenge of reviewing this blog is that it is designed to enhance classroom learning, so we can’t see what is taking place in the background, and the layout is not designed for us to navigate. Mr. Hayes is currently working on a blend between Google Docs and the blog to make organization of resources and tasks more streamlined.