Your Blog Guide

With E Portfolios starting to come on line and the need for students to become reflective learners a Personal Learning Blog is a great idea.  Somewhere where students can reflect on their learning, what is going right and what could be going better.

Teachers can become an active part of these learning blogs by leaving comments and advice.  How I have used them is as part of an ongoing assessment of how students are learning.  I encourage my students to leave open but constructive comments about particular activities, topics or lesson objectives.  I found this a little bit nervy to start with but it has been a valuable tool to help assess my performance and comments have been useful, informative, sometimes motivational but almost always maturely put together by the students.

This exercise has been a good way of using technology for personal assessment as well as receiving feedback on how I am doing.  I found students were much more open using a blog than they would be in class.  Students could decide to only allow themselves and me to view their blogs if this was more comfortable for them.  I recommended that their parents should also be able to view which I found some parents very eager to use and comment also!

Below is the link I gave to my students as an example for their blog and they filled it in once a week.

 http://personallearningblogexample.blogspot.com/