Using Blogs in Science Education

You can find a lot of blog safety guidelines with a quick google search.   Here’s what I use:

Student and Parent Blog & Wiki Contract

Blog Safety Rules

I also show the students the following video.

Download Video: Posted by mjhasley at TeacherTube.com.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that it negatively portrays the janitorial staff (which the kids already do on their own), but otherwise it’s a great video.  After I show it I have a lengthy discussion with the kids about internet safety.

After almost two years of blogging (one with students) I’ve run across some fantastic add-ons for my blog. I thought I’d list the ones that I really like for those teachers just getting started.

Slideshare
Share powerpoints online and embed them into your blog (works just like youtube)

Google Docs
Create and share documents, spreedsheets, etc.

Box.net
Upload documents and link to them. When people link to your document they can either download it or just preview it (this is great if students don’t have the software to download the file).

Widgetbox
Want to add an Amazon booklist to your blog? Or a countdown? Widgetbox has a lot of fun widgets. You can even turn your blog into a widget (blidget) to include on another website (you can see my Extreme Biology blidget on the right sidebar).

Sitemeter
A great way to track your site visitors. I like to check referring sites to see how people have found my blog.

Clustrmaps
I don’t really find it useful for anything, but it provides a fun graphic of the location of your blog visitors. Edublogs just added it as a widget so it’s now super easy to add it if you use the edublogs service.

Technorati
This site lets you see when other people write about your blog or include you in their blogroll. It’s really useful for building connections.

Feedburner
Wonderful tool to track how many people subscribe to your blog. My favorite part is that you can make personalized feed signatures to include in your emails. Set up isn’t for the faint of heart so give yourself a Saturday to work on it.

Voicethread
Make your slideshows/videos interactive by adding voice and video comments. You can embed them directly into your blog.

I posted my infamous Biology of Love lecture on slideshare a couple of months ago and since then it’s been downloaded over 100 times!  The success has inspired me to update the lecture for 2008.  Here is the updated 2nd version.

*10/3/08 Update – The 2nd version has been downloaded 859 times!!!  Wow!  I sure hope all the people who are downloading it are giving me credit for all of my hard work.

Slideshare doesn’t support videos so I had to take those out.  I use various clips from youtube that show interesting courtship rituals and then, of course, the finale which is the dance scene from Saturday Night Fever.  The kids love it.  We eat sweetharts candy and I give out small giveaways for correctly answering trivia questions.  This year I’m only going to give the presentation to my AP students because sadly, my 9th graders are not mature enough.  I did successfully show it to my 9th graders last year, though.

Will Richardson caught my attention with his post, “Looking for Student Bloggers.” He laments that there are few student blogs that contain writing with a “synthesis that incorporates a deeper understanding” that avoids being “too report-ish.” I agree readily with Richardson and he’s received quite a few interesting comments to his post that I recommend you read.

I’ve tried really hard to get my students to think critically on the blog and avoid a standard report style of writing. However, it’s a science class so I’m never going to be greatly enthusiastic about the type of creative writing you’d find in an English class. Science writing requires a more technical approach. But, technical doesn’t have to equal dry and boring.

Richardson’s post made me think about the kind of writing on the student blog that has been the most successful at engaging readers and sparking great conversations. It becomes immediately obvious after a brief perusal that posts that dealt with controversial issues have had the greatest impact and it certainly makes sense why. However, I’ve shied away from putting too many controversial issues on the blog for fear of upsetting people. But, I’ve decided to include more starting with my most recent posts on racism and evolution. Although I authored these posts, I’m hoping my students will feel more inspired to submit their own posts that deal with controversial topics. I just published a student post today on morality and next week I’ll publish one on human evolution. Either I’m being brave or incredibly stupid.

I didn’t realize how many controversial topics there are in biology until I began teaching it. Here are just a few of the hot button issues biology teachers delve into each year:

1. Evolution
2. Sexual reproduction
3. Animal behavior (including things like altruistic behavior)
4. Ecological issues (global warming, habitat destruction, pollution, animal rights)
5. Bioengineering
6. Medical research

I’m sure I forgot a few. I’d love to hear from other teachers with blogs and find out what their experience has been like in dealing with controversial topics. Any tips or suggestions are greatly welcomed.

I haven’t quite figured out how to use voicethread in a productive manner with my students, but I did want to learn how to use it. So I created this thread for practice. Hopefully, it will be of use to someone.  Please let me know what you thought of it!

Comment-free Day. Last semester I moderated over 2,300 comments. Yes, I’m exhausted. While I enjoyed reading my students’ comments, there were many days when I needed to grade their non-blog related assignments, but I was busy with the blog. This semester, Wednesdays will be no commenting day. Students may not comment to the blog on this day in order to give me time to take care of other grading.

Think carefully about your point set-up. While my students love the blog, they wouldn’t have participated if it weren’t for a grade. I gave them 2 points per comment and 10 points per blog post. I have 66 students and with this point set-up I had to grade a lot of comments and posts. Next semester I will change to this point-set up: 5 points per comment, 8 points per comment made to another biology blog, and 20 points per blog post. I will expect even better content from my students in return for the increase in points. This point set-up will be more manageable for me grading-wise. In other words, the number of students you have should be considered when deciding on your point breakdown.

Design an easy way for students to check their grade during the semester. Next semester students (and their parents) will sign a consent form allowing me to post their grade online. For those students who are not comfortable having their grade posted for all the world to see, I will give them a worksheet that they will use to keep track of their own posts.

Save procrastinators from themselves. Last semester, students could earn 100 points at any point during the semester. The only restriction I had in place in order to keep students from procrastinating was to only accept one blog post per week and 10 comments per day. This semester, students must earn 25 points by designated dates during the semester. There will be four designated block dates. Students may not make up any missed points after a set date has passed. For example, if a student only earned 18 points during the first block, the maximum score that student can make on the project is a 93, regardless of how many comments or posts made the rest of the semester. Students can still only submit one blog post per week, but they may only submit 2 comments per day.

The questionnaire I gave my students on the last day of fall classes included a place to write suggestions for the spring blog. Here are their responses (similar responses have been combined):

• assign topics

I think it stifles student creativity to tell the students what they must write about, but for students who feel insecure I’ll be more open to sharing and brainstorming ideas with them

• invite guest blog authors

I would love this, but I’m not sure how to go about finding appropriate guest bloggers. I think it might be hard. Anyone have any ideas?

I think it’s considered better blog etiquette to have students write to other people’s blogs rather than ask them to write on our blog. So I’m going to come up with a point incentive to get students to post to other science blogs.

• have a place where visitors can submit blog requests
• more post variety (too many endangered species posts)

I definitely agree with this request. Students are going to have to think outside the box next semester.

• allow old posts to be commented on

I didn’t allow this last semester because I didn’t want a student to wait until the last minute to work on the project and earn points for commenting to dead posts. But, I ran into a problem with one post that dealt with an ongoing issue and several students still wanted to talk about it weeks after it was posted. So I’m thinking of removing the restriction for certain blog posts.

• more consistency on when certain posts are published (i.e. Endless Forms Most Beautiful posts are always published on Sunday, Positive posts are always published on Wednesday)

I think this would be helpful to our readers. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Sunday – Endless Forms Most Beautiful – highlights incredible evolutionary adaptations

Monday – The Real World – something the students can relate to in their everyday lives

Tuesday – Classroom Connection – directly relates to a class discussion, assignment, or lab

Wednesday – Positive Post – no bad news, just warm and fuzzy posts

Thursday – ?

Friday – ?

Saturday – ?

Do you have any ideas for these three days?

• better method to track points

If I had $1 for every time a student asked me last semester how many blog points they had I would be a very rich person. Next semester I’ll either regularly post points online or demand that the students take responsibility and keep track of their own points. The latter sounds best to me.

• more videos
• more debates
  
• better judging system for comments
  

Hmmm, how to determine if a comment should be posted and a student should receive credit for it is the million dollar question.

• make no changes please, I like how it is

Well, obviously I have plans to improve the blog so I can’t fulfill this last request, but I do think those that don’t want any changes to be made will end up liking the changes.

Yesterday I received an email from a teacher in St. Louis with several questions for me.

1. How do students log into the blog? Do they each have their own account or just one student account?

The great thing about blogs is unlike bulletin boards and wikis they can be used safely with students without requiring usernames and passwords. Students don’t have to log in to use it. However, I do have comment moderation turned on. That way when a student writes a comment to a post it doesn’t automatically appear on the blog until I’ve read and approved it. You can see my blog training website to find my safety information and a student safety contract. I held a blog training session for teachers at my school and built that website for the training. I just want to interject here that I am by no means an expert in blogging, but I do feel I can passionately speak out for the positive benefits of using blogs in the science classroom, hence the purpose of this blog.

2. Do you require students to blog for a grade?

Yes! They must earn 100 blog points per semester. The project is worth about 20% of their grade. Some might think that is initially a bit much, but if you start a blog with you’re students you’ll discover how much work it is for the students and why it is so beneficial. The blog developed out of my personal philosophy of science education – students should understand that science is a collaborative process, not a mere collection of facts. Students develop science literacy skills by using the blog to discuss science news, thus I find it greatly valuable to their education.

3. If yes, how often are students required to blog?

It’s a semester long project. I made it pretty flexible for the students. I gave 10 points per post and 2 points per comment. So they could either reach 100 points by writing 50 comments, 10 blog posts, or a mix of the two. Most students completed a mixture of the two. I had guidelines that the students had to follow in order to receive points for posts and comments.

I have 60 students so my point system required me to grade quite a few comments (over 2,500!), so next semester I’m going to give more points per post and comment. However, I’ll also have tougher restrictions on what makes an acceptable post or comment.

4. Do most students blog at school or at home?

At home. I gave them quite a few homework nights to just work on the blog. On those nights I didn’t keep track of who actually worked on it or not for any grading purposes. That way students could respond to blog posts when they enjoyed the post rather than just doing it for a grade.

5. How do students decide what to blog on?

This semester I left it pretty open. Anything dealing with biology was okay. Next semester, however, I plan on tightening the restrictions a bit now that they are comfortable with using the blog. I’ll be posting a list of some of changes for next semester over the Christmas break. The list will include what worked this semester and what didn’t work and why. I’ll also be posting my student blog training suggestions. It takes a bit of work to get students to learn how to effectively write posts and comment on posts, but it’s well worth the effort.

Was this information helpful? Please let me know if you have any additional questions. I’d love to hear more about you and students. If you decide to start a blog for your students, please send me the web address and sporadically drop by and let me know how it’s going!

After my students and I were nominated for an Edublog Award I received quite a few emails from educators asking me how I use the blog in my classes. I’ve even been asked to guest speak at a University education class! In order to open up the conversations I’ve been having with educators to everyone rather than keeping them confined to emails, I’ve created this blog.

So, why use blogs in biology education? My students answer that question best. The following are a few excerpts from a survey my 9th grade (14-15 year old) students completed yesterday after a full semester of blogging. They wrote these responses anonymously.

I learned a lot about biology and how it relates to our everyday life.

I learned more about biology and learned how to better use websites to communicate.

I improved my researching skills.

I now have a better understanding of the world around me and I got to see many issues around the world.

I improved my writing and analytical skills by responding to different posts and by answering different questions that the person who wrote the posts asked. I also learned new facts about different animals and many important current events.

I learned how beneficial student discussion is.

The blog project really helped me see the new advances made in science. It also helped me see my classmates opinions.

I learned about current events.

I benefited from this project because it helped me learn about topics that I probably would not have ever heard about if it were not for the blog.