stupid torn ligaments (woes of a virtual teacher)

image from flickr under creative commons license

I took a tumble at work on monday and wrecked my ankle. Torn ligaments or so slightly offensive hospital nurse tells me after squeezing my legs over and over because of suspected achilles tendon issues. I didn’t enjoy it

So I’ve been virtual teaching via blogs, email and later today a wiki. I miss darting around the lab getting enthusiastic, but it’s been fun sitting with nice coffee, my feet up and watching Frasier while going through the fine points of protein folding with the AS students. Who last weeks were told they had to submit their homework without it being a written document. It’s given at least one interesting result,

I don’t think I could (or would want to) get used to this though.

Why blog, why?

I’ve been playing around with blogs for a little while and have tried to use them in different ways. Moving from personal to educational blogs was an interesting transition and the first steps in this direction were in setting of cover work. The students were given the link to a blog which outlined the detail and information of whatever cover work they needed to do. This was ideal for those last minute illnesses because I could email the link from my sick bed.

 As I’ve gotten more used to them I’m getting a bit more confident. The BTEC students  had their own blogs for a Chemistry assignment, they were meant to be more informative than anything and were met with mixed reviews. Some students took to it like a duck to water, from others I’ve had the odd You Tube video posted and little else. We have a department blog that is meant to inform parents, students and the local community what exactly it is that we are doing on the science floor, and we have a number of revision blogs set up for the A-level students.

In terms of the work I’d like to do with students, I hope that at the start of the new academic year to set up individual blogs for the students so they can reflect on their progress and collaborate on their ideas through the comments system. Maybe not strictly for submission of work, but also to vocalise some of the frustrations and triumphs of the course, and summarise their learning. I see some good potential here with the coursework that the A-Level students will undertake next year.

 In terms of obstacles, blogs can sometimes be limiting for collaborative work, the comments and action on comments system is good in terms of feedback, but in terms of project collaboration I haven’t yet seen an easy way to do it through blogging (as opposed to say a wiki). I’d also be concerned about those students who just don’t have access at home,

I hope to continue with the departmental blog, set up class blogs for students and encourage them to keep their own blogs through the next year.

Learning to edublog

I’ve used blogspot for a while now, but hitting F5 on the school computers in a desperate attempt to bypass the sporadic internet filter has gotten boring so edublog looks like a quite wonderful alternative.

It’s quite slick looking too. See, I got a birdy