This particular research project took place in Quakertown, PA. Not only did this particular research use Blog, it also incorporated Wiki pages. They wanted the third grade students to be able to respond meaningfully to guided reading texts.
First they had students write responses on index cards and respond to guided reading texts for one month. The responses were scored based on a rubric. While doing this students rated their motivation on a Likert Scale. Then after the first part was collected they began introducing blogging from a Wiki page. The students then began posting their responses as blogs and being able to respond to other peers posts. Then after 6 weeks of doing this they again rated their motivation on The Likert Scale.
It was very interesting to me that the students were somewhat reluctant with their responses using the Blog because they were unsure of exactly who would be reading them. However once they started getting responses and doing some of their own the excitement started to show some.
Wikis and Blogs are a great interactive source in allowing children to share their thoughts, responses and writing ideas publically. It was really interesting to see that the more this was used the more the creative and fun it began to be for the students. Wiki and Blogs also are very good at promoting social inteactions.
My favorite part of the Blog is that students seem to be more aware of their writing, word choice, creativeness, and efforts that go into making a paper great! Motivation scores went up while choosing to use Blogs and Wiki. As I stated before the children seemed to really work harder and were more aware of what they were doing when they knew it would be posted.
The point of typing/keyboarding was brought up in this article and it really didn't seem to be any big deal at all. The students worked at their own pace and did what they needed however they needed to. I have noticed with a class that uses keyboarding often for projects this is really not an issue what so ever.
I thought a while after reading this research and thought about how useful this could really be to my classroom and myself. I wish I could be more creative with the use of I-Pods, or game systems because as I am typing this summary I just had two students who had their games systems taken away here at school. I will continue to think and work on incorporating ALL Kinds of technology into my classroom.
References:
Legutko, R.S., Swanson, K.N., (2008). The Effect of Book Bloggingon the Motivation of 3rd Grade Students.
Thanks so much for sharing this article! I think the possiblities of blogs are endless. Earlier this semester I wrote a blog on how to use blogs in the classroom. I'm pretty sure the list has double since taking this class! It's comforting to hear research that backs up the effectiveness of blogs in the classroom. I'm excited to try using a blog in my own classroom
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