Blogs as a learning tool
Year: 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
School: Wellington High School
Teacher: Terry Hawkins
Technological area: Construction and Mechanical Technologies, Resistant Materials - hard
Category: Teaching strategy.
Wellington High School is a co-educational school in central Wellington with a role of 1050 students. The school has embraced the Technology curriculum with a comprehensive range of subjects with workshops for food, fabrics, wood, and metal alongside separate labs for electronics and graphics. The school also has a very strong focus on ICT as a Technology subject in its own right, and as a tool used within the other Technology areas.
The most successful example of ICT in this particular context is a system of student blogs, set up by Technology teacher Terry Hawkings in 2006 to document student Technology work, that have since taken the place of paper portfolios as student documentation.
This Teaching Snapshot looks at the key advantages of this system to teachers, schools, and, most importantly, students, in supporting Technological Practice and assessment of national achievement standards.
Background
Terry Hawkings has a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Geography, which he followed with a Diploma in Audio Engineering before working as a sound engineer for several years.
Terry utilised this varied background when he became a Technology teacher at Wellington High School nine years ago. In 2003, Wellington High School was granted funding from the Wellington ICT cluster group, which was utilised to free up time for Technology teachers to develop their programmes. For Terry this meant addressing some of his main concerns with the way Technology is taught, particularly in the documentation of student work, which led to him developing the student blog system over a year.
"Initially, my goal was to do away with paperwork but still get students writing. It worked really well because they didn't see 'blogging' as 'writing', so they wrote heaps and were able to show their process at the same time," says Terry.
While this worked extremely well in the Technology class, Terry also wanted to improve some basic skill areas that would prove useful across the board.
"My philosophy is to teach students lateral skills that can be used over a number of disciplines. With the blogging, I wanted to improve student literacy and their marks and grades got better because of that. Eventually it developed into their whole portfolio, so now when I do moderation I send the blog links directly to NZQA."
How it works
Since the first student blogs went online in 2006, Terry has used this process to document all areas within the Technology curriculum that he teaches at Wellington High School.
"As a Technology teacher I've got to show process, so I've got to get students to show that process throughout the development of their portfolio of work, which is set by every standard," says Terry. "I have a camera in the room so students take photos of anything they have completed at any stage right through. Once that's done they will go into a computer lab and post all their photos with a description of what they've done."
Depending on the project, students may update the blog for every major milestone achieved, starting around three times a week when they are using the computers heavily in the design stage. The students also document any CAD work completed on the computer at this point with screen-shots.
The time in the computer room decreases as the students spend more time in the workshop, though photographs are continually taken at each finished stage of a given project with blogging done every week.
Design Technology Materials e-Portfolio.
Once the students have completed their outcome, they then write a final evaluation on their blog, describing the process from start to finish and any problems met along the way.
Benefits
Terry has noticed that writing the final evaluation is now far easier for the students, as the work done on the blogs throughout the year provides a thorough documentation of their process.
"At each stage they've thought about it, embedded their photos and then written about it. So it's less about generating work from their semantic memory and more about an episode that describes something. I believe that episodic memory is much more powerful because it's easier to learn stuff by episodes than trying to learn it by rote."
Terry is keen to stress that there are many benefits to blogging for Technology students in skill development across all academic areas, and many student's greatly improve their general ICT skills after one year of blogging their Technology projects.
"A student's computer literacy is improved and this is extremely important. And rather than learning one programme to the nth degree, they should be intuitively literate, where they learn to apply skills to all sorts of other programs."
Terry also sees huge advantages to the students interested in making the transition from high school Technology to university-level engineering and design programmes."The blogging coincides well with what what's happening at universities, where they are designing and building stuff and blogging the process. So it's about a smooth transition to tertiary study, and my kids that have gone on to design and engineering school have found this pretty easy because they're used to that technology and that process."
While Terry is extremely happy with the extra benefits to students, he stresses that the blogging and other ICT aspects of his classes are there as tools in the overall technological process in projects as diverse as making lights, speakers and soundtracks for short films and games.
"Obviously it's a record of their learning, which is something I really want, but fundamentally it's a tool to make sure that whatever's in their head can happen and all my software and hardware is geared up towards that. The outcome is the most important thing."
Challenges
Implementing the programme in 2006 wasn't always a smooth process, however. "The biggest challenge was making sure it I could link it all to our school Moodle. When I first started our school network wasn't that good, but over the last few years with the advent of a wireless network and freeing up more servers and more computer time, things have improved," Terry explains.
Terry says the biggest on-going challenge that the blogs present now is the correct labelling of student work online, something he has to be quite vigilant about.
"I get students to label their work by a standard number but sometimes they forget to label it or they give it the wrong standard number or put it the wrong way around. So every now and then I get them to sit down and edit everything and make sure it's all right so there's a constant editing process that they have to do as well."
Key benefits to teachers
Kenji's Speaker Design blog.
Kenji's Speaker Design blog.
While Terry admits that are some challenges to maintaining the blogs, the benefits to teachers far outweigh any drawbacks.
"The beautiful thing about it is that students don't see it as a chore, so all my behaviour management problems have disappeared. I don't have to force students to write something, they just go off and do it."
Terry also feels that as an online resource, blogging student work also creates significant advantages for teachers, students and the wider community.
"For other students and teachers, the blog also ends up being an instruction manual for how to build what has been made. So if anybody else wanted to make up a student's design, they could, and its easier because you're not flicking pages but just scrolling down and seeing the whole process. The other thing is that people can write comments so they might peer assess each other's work or another teacher might write a comment," says Terry.
Terry is also a keen advocate of the paperless classroom model after seeing first-hand the positive results this can have.
"I really don't see the need for paper anymore – it takes up space and kills trees. Why not put everything on the servers? It's also really easy to mark, as I just post a comment on their blog, which might be a sentence, once every two weeks just to keep them on track. This has cut down my marking time by literally weeks, which has got to be great for any teacher," says Terry.
Of course, with all this access to student work, Terry has had to reassure some parents and teachers on the safety of blogging student work.
"The way I've set it up it's pretty unlikely that people are going to come across it, but if they did, the only person that can modify their blogs is the students themselves. People can write comments, but there's nothing else they can actually do that will affect the blogs. All people can really do is look at some student work, which is something that I think should be shared, particularly with other Technology teachers."
Terry had some fears at first that other students might make negative comments on each other's work but was pleased to find that they took it very seriously.
"It's very clear to students right from the start that this work is a binding document for their credits, and they respect that. They also don't want to be seen as immature online – they know other people could be seeing their work. So I've had no problems at all with that in six years," says Terry.
In summary
After several years of using the blog system, Terry is most happy with the way the programme has successfully evolved over time, as new methods create new benefits for the students.
"I'm always changing things, including the way they're blogging. Last year, I tried a different blogging program, where instead of writing students had to do a video diary every week of their work and I was able to mark that in a way that was applicable to NCEA. This was more real as well and better for me as a teacher, because I was able to see their expressions, and assess how they really felt the project was going," Terry explains.
Terry has also received great response on the blogging system from former pupils, other Technology teachers and the school.
"Overall the feedback has been really good. The only people that haven't embraced it is NZQA – every time I've sent them a link they've said 'No, this isn't in a format that we can mark'. But my school is very supportive and have told me to just keep doing it."