This is my new blog for my Educational Technology class with Texas A&M, Commerce.  I am going to explore using blogs in an Engineering and Design Presentation class for high school students to meet the TEKS requirement of using an engineering notebook to explore engineering design methodologies including design components, concept presentations and to present prototypes and to make corrections to any design mistakes.   Student blogs would be shared through out the class to allow for peer review and input.  According to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy, creating an engineering notebook teaches students to create new ideas and evaluate their work supporting higher order thinking skills.  

I believe this pedagogy falls under Constructivism because students will be asked to make assimilations and accommodations while learning though questioning what they know and learning from their mistakes.  They will work as a community to help each other brainstorm, problem solve and evaluate the project. 

The blog will serve as a record of their journey from concept to completed project.  As a daily record of a student's thought process, blogs afford students an opportunity to record, review, and correct their thinking and help develop critical thinking and writing skills.  The teacher can guide blog posts with a prompt to keep students on the right track but give students the freedom to explore their thoughts independently.  Sharing blogs allow students to share their ideas and make recommendations for improvements.

 

A blog could also be used as a journal of daily activities, a journal for tracking any project start to finish, or as a record for parents to track a student's progress.  A blog could also be used to help brainstorm independently, then bring work together for group projects. 

I have considered several obstacles to using a blog as an educational tool.  Many students may not have the writing or vocabulary skills to adequately express themselves in a blog post (specifically special needs or 504 students).  Twenty students posting to a blog each period, each day would require a lot of reading or grading on the teacher's part.  A grading rubric for a blog would be more subjective and open to interpretation if questioned by parents or administration.  All these things considered, I believe a blog would be worth using because it would create a student-created learning record that could be saved forever.