Blog Reflection

The instructional strategies that I think would work best with blogs would be scaffolding and constructivism. The reasons for this is when using the blog you could set up some sort of task for the students that would help guide them without actually giving them the direct instruction. A big reason I think it would utilize constructivism is that the commenting and idea sharing would give students a great opportunity to create some knowledge. As a teacher, you could post a thought you want the students to explore, or post a problem you want them to talk about. From there, the students could comment on the post and create their own knowledge through conversations they post in comments.

I think the instructional strategy that would be very difficult to use with blogs would be didactic. I think it would be extremely hard to facilitate as a teacher to provide a general rule and then give students examples in a blog. Having students read a general rule and see an example in a blog is no different than writing it on a whiteboard in front of the classroom.

The idea that I have been considering to bring blogs into my classroom to help my subject matter is to utilize it as a way for students to get help with problems they do not understand. I would like to post a generic post about the lesson that we went over in class. From there, I would like to promote a conversation that the students respond to one another by commenting on the post. I would hope that the students could then answer their own questions by creating a forum of sharing their ideas.

I think that would actually answer the bonus question, trying to get students to understand things by creating a dialogue between the learners would help them to understand concepts better. Especially in math, I think it would benefit them a great deal to have a place where they could get instant access to how to work through problems in a verbal sense.