As usual, online writing and discussion is an important part of my Grade 12 University level course. I’ve elected to use both a class wiki and individual student blogs for this component.

Our class is using 21Classes for our blogging platform. I chose this because it allows me to set security at levels that are comfortable for me and my administration. All of the students’ work is visible only to members of the blog portal. If necessary, I can also set permissions so that all blog posts and comments must be approved by me prior to being published.

One month into our semester, and I’m really impressed with the quality of interactions happening online. I’ve given students broad topics and a target number of posts and comments for each unit.

This past week, I noticed a significant improvement in the quality of the posts and comments appearing online. It dawned on me that the students had just completed their blogging self-evaluations. Unlike many evaluations that students seem to just accept as their achievement, this self-evaluation process appears to be encouraging better online communication. Since the self-evaluation, the entire class seems to be very careful to incorporate images using only the “Attribution License” images from Flickr; they’re properly citing these images; they’re all using links in their posts with displayed text, including links to their earlier posts; and they’re replying to comments left on their own blogs. It will be interesting to see what happens after the next self-evaluation in a couple of weeks.

Based on this experience, I’m going to be introducing more structured self-evaluation in other areas, too. It’s a bit more work — I feel like I still need to ‘mark’ their work myself as well as ‘marking’ their self-evaluation — but the quality of the students’ work is well worth it.

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Photo by mezone