Looking at Blogs

My rough plan has been to split the lesson periods (1.5 hours) roughly equally between whole class teaching / discussion and individual group work — at least until we’ve covered the theory and skills required for the learners to work more independantly.

This time I was looking at “What is a Blog”

About 2/3rds of the class had never come across the idea before and the discussion on the differences between a Blog and a ‘normal’ website took some times, and I think some of the subtleties may have been lost.

Another time I think I might get people to produce a written list of differnces and try and make that clearer.

I described the basic components of a blog, the elements most blogs will tend to have in common – posts, pages, categories, archives, links and feeds, and compared these to the familiar company blog which all trainees are introduced to at induction and encouraged to use regularly through their training.

I then introduced the idea of searching for blogs and had trainees use Google Blog Search to search for blogs on topics of interest, and try to identify these common elements.

It was worth noting here that the vast majority of trainees could not identify the “Sponsored Links” as the adverts they were, and needed this explaining. The search terms chosen were also often rather weak. Another time I think I might devote a session before this one to ensuring everyone was up to speed on general Internet use.  We do have pre-exisiting learning material for selecting search terms and evaluating websites, which we use as part of the ICT Key Skills training.

However, with a greater or lesser degree of support all trainees were able to locate a suitable blog and identify the main points. The younger members of the class tended to race on ahead at this point, which wasn’t a problem as it kept them occupied with something at least vaugely related while I talked through the less expereinced learners.

To continue getting familiar with other people’s blogs and the kind of topics which can be covered I next gave out a handout listing some sample blogs and asking trainees to (in pairs) make lists of what they thought were the good points and bad points.

We then came back together as a group and discussed these.

The pairwork was the first taste of collaborative learning a lot of them had done in a long time (if ever) and as the group is still quite new and don’t know each other very well it was a slow start and needed a bit of encouragement to get discussion going.  I moved among the class prompting with questions where needed and agreeing with some of the good comments being made.

One learner in particular was very unenthusiastic about the pairwork and rather reluctant to contribute.  He was spoken to individually by a senior trainer and does seem to have improved his attitude dramatically since then.

The sessions seem to be over very quickly and could do with a bit more time allotted maybe, as it seemed to go very quickly, but the learners seemed much happier this session in spite of a lot of new material and information being covered.