Blogstorm

Something extraordinary is happening to our student teacher population at Plymouth University. They are becoming excited at the prospect of sharing their ideas to a potential worldwide audience, and relish the idea of having dialogue with their readership. People are beginning to notice an increase in the quantity and quality of blog posts and tweets emerging from our group of learners in the School of Education. Someone tweeted last night during the Bolton Teachmeet that Plymouth seems to be the 'edudigital capital' of the UK. Even our own Vice Chancellor Professor Wendy Purcell (@WMPUPVC) this morning remarked on how productive our student body has become on social media platforms over the past few months. Here at Plymouth we are taking social media seriously, and are encouraging innovative uses. We are promoting the idea that any teacher can become a global educator through the appropriate use of Web 2.0 tools. We embed a lot of different tools - wikis, blogs, podcasts, lecture capture, interactive whiteboards - into the fabric of our teaching sessions, and this effort is clearly beginning to pay off.

My colleagues Peter Yeomans (@ethinking on Twitter) and Oliver Quinlan (@oliverquinlan) have between them generated an exciting culture of sharing on the web for our primary education students, and have created the plymuniprimary site to aggregate the B.Ed (Hons) student blogs. Earlier today another 20 or so students on my BA Education Studies programme also started out on their blogging journey, and there have been several outstanding blog posts already. Some of the earlier posts can be found on my Student Blogs Scoop.it site. A variety of topics is covered, including txting, personal learning environments, classroom technology, plagiarism and e-safety.

What do the students learn from blogging? Well, the list is endless, but for example, we have evidence to suggest that they improve their writing skills, and also their confidence in public writing and engagement in discourse. There are problem solving and communication skills required. They must consider how they present their ideas and arguments, and what images, videos, hypermedia and other tools they will use to attract people to read their blogs. They will also be able to crystallise their ideas, practice their academic writing and make themselves more aware of issues such as copyright, navigation and plagiarism of content on the web. To gain so much from such a simple tool must be a bonus for any teacher.

Please pay a visit to some of these student blogs if you have some time, and make a comment or two. It will certainly encourage the students to keep up their good work and push their ideas further.

Image by Adam Gimpert


Blogstorm by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.