Blogging in ICT Class

For several years now I have had my ICT students maintain a blog using Google's Blogger platform. From a technical perspective the process has worked well. There have been few issues and students have been able to integrate several other Google products or services. For the past couple of years students have been using Google Analytics to track blog traffic in a fairly complex manner. Last year a few students incorporated Google's AdSense service into their blogs, although any revenue for them is likely some time off!

From a teaching perspective there is the issue of how to best handle "errors", typically spelling and grammatical errors, that appear in student blogs. Should the teacher "rush" to have these corrected or should they be treated as part of the growth process? Alongside this is the issue of content itself. How would I handle inappropriate content posted by one of my students?

I like to think that I solved the content concern by giving my students a relatively narrow focus for their blog content. They had to make posts on any and all new software packages that formed part of the course content. In addition, once a week or so I would suggest a "breaking news" tech topic that would be suitable for a blog post. The issue of spelling and grammar is a work in progress. Generally I send students e-mails with suggested corrections but as the volume of blogging posts rises this becomes increasingly time-consuming.

Early on I discoverd that analytics could be very helpful as a motivational tool. I have various "bonus marks" awards that I allocate to students who can demonstrate that they are the first with say twenty unique visitors, the first with visits from three continents, the first with a visitor from Africa, the first with visitors from three greater Vancouver municipalities. You get the idea; this can be extended to greater and more complex challenges. Students quickly get the idea that they can apply marketing and promotional tools to their blogs.

This year I am considering alternate platforms for my student blogging work. I have been examing the EduBlogs platform for some time and have monitored numerous Twitter posts concerning that service.

Irrespective of the platform, I've come to the conclusion that student blogging is an excellent tool to incorporate into ICT classes.

This blog post was written after reading an EduBlogger post concerning that service. That post referenced five different issues concerning blogging in an education setting. I settled on "When you first started blogging what aspects of blogging worked well? What has caused problems? What would you change? — you can discuss this in terms of class, student or your own personal blogging!" as the topic I'd consider in my my post.