It All Starts Here

Over the years, I have benefited from the efforts of countless bloggers, who had shared their wisdom ranging from insights about teaching AP Physics, to labeling assignments in Google Classroom with emojis, or the best way to hard-boil an egg (spoiler: steaming works best). Though at points I had considered playing with various blogging platforms and starting one of my own, the final push came in the form of a research project to explore blogging as an educational tool that I was assigned in the Introduction to Educational Technology course I am enrolled in through Texas A&M University: Commerce.

A blog is a living artifact that documents the thoughts, opinions, and observations of the author(s) during the time period that the blog is maintained. One affordance of a blog is that it allows a public outpouring of personal experience, expertise, and insights, making it particularly useful in field of education, particularly in the sciences. Hypothesizing, observing, documenting, and drawing conclusions are all skills that are nurtured in budding scientists, yet without an ability to effectively communicate with others, the most brilliant discoveries would be lost. In a broader context, a blog is a journal made public. For the science student, it becomes a venue to share exciting discoveries that, not too long ago, would have only recorded in private lab notebooks. Not only does a blog allow the science student to share their findings with a class, school, or global network, but it opens the door for feedback, sharing ideas, and making new connections.

In the few years that I have taught AP Physics, I have experimented with various implementations of the traditional lab notebook – ranging from the black and white composition notebook I used in school, to a student-developed digital catalog of lab reports hosted in their Google Drive. In partnership with my science department colleagues, I tried to find the most effective way of allowing students to peer-review their work. Sometimes they physically traded notebooks (this is now off the table in the COVID-19 era), other times they would share access and add comments to Google Docs. My hope was that (for some lab reports) the students would take their work through various iterations, integrating feedback from myself and others to refine their writing and presentation. There is value in this, but unfortunately the communication was largely after the experiment was completed – they were just polishing the final product. I should note that for many experiments, the term lab report does not always mean a traditional full report – our district has moved towards a modular lab approach where different lab activity write ups emphasize different components of scientific writing.

If a blog were used in lieu of a lab notebook, students could be updating it and getting feedback from peers in real time. It is not unheard of for some labs to stretch over multiple class periods, including the time it takes to plan a procedure, set up and collect data, analyze the results and double check sources of error. Rather than waiting for a review of the final product, students could check in with each other’s blogs in between class periods, offer feedback and suggestions in comments, and maintain a running dialogue. I found that sometimes students would have such a thread of dialogue in the comments of a Google Doc, but then only those included students could benefit from the discussion. A blog could open this dialogue to a wider audience, even if only within a school or class.

Most students have cell phones and other devices at their disposal, making it easy to integrate photos of lab apparatus, data tables from probes, or short videos of their successful trials into the blog, providing a much greater level of detail than a traditional lab notebook would allow. Students can see how another student solved a common problem with their experimental design and implement needed changes when collecting data the next day. Perhaps a student could record a narration of the observations they have made, including references to senses not recorded in a photograph (smells, sounds, or tactile feeling, when applicable). Ben Newsome suggests that a specific student could be assigned the role of “lead blogger” for a particular experiment, which would require them to record images/video that would be stored in a common location for all team members to pull from in their individual blogs. Just as I have pulled various links into this post, blogging could encourage students to do outside research, looking for connections to the phenomenon they are observing online, and link those back into their posts, as well. Mariana Garcia Serrato shares that in her 5th to 8th grade science classes, “blogs had become a space where students were exploring ideas not presented in the science classroom”, and could I see this developing with my students, as well.

If a student maintained the same blog throughout their entire high school career, they would have an established portfolio of the research they have been involved with in a number of science disciplines. This could be used to demonstrate marketable science skills to potential university admission committees or future employers. Consolidating their research experience in one location would have the added benefit of allowing students to more naturally make cross-cutting connections between the different science disciplines. This application highlights another affordance of blogging – the ability to create a digital time capsule of personal knowledge and understanding. As mentioned above, the blog reflects the thoughts, opinions, and observations of the author(s) during the time period that the blog is maintained. In my research for this project, I came across a graveyard of blogs that have long been abandoned, some for well over a decade. Though no longer active, they still provide a window into the thoughts of the author at that time. While the blog provides opportunity for feedback and discussion in the form of comments, it primarily expresses the view of the author. For a science student looking back over a high school career’s worth of blogging, there exists a unique opportunity to observe and reflect on the evolution of their understanding of science concepts, as well as their improvement as a science writer and researcher. This could allow students to achieve a higher level of meta learning, setting them up for greater success as they pursue higher education or enter the career field.

In addition to an alternative to lab notebooks, I can see a blog being a useful tool to document a single, long-term project. I teach a project-based engineering elective course, in which students collaborate to solve various science challenges. I encourage students to follow the engineering design process, which emphasizes the importance of testing and undergoing multiple iterations (just because you built it does not mean its done!) In one project (inspired by a Science Olympiad competition), students design wind turbine blade assemblies to maximize the voltage produced when placed in front of a window fan. Students documented the multiple iterations of their designs, including photos of each model, changes made between iterations and the reason for those changes, and the resulting voltage produced in testing. My vision was for students to compile their results on a Google site, as part of a portfolio of their projects for the semester. Unfortunately, the majority of the group was unfamiliar with creating a Google site, and I had not structured adequate time to teach that skill into my planning. As a result, I allowed students to submit their project in a format they were comfortable with – some chose to make a Site, others used Google Docs, etc. If blogging had been integrated into our district’s science curriculum, the students would have already had familiarity with a great mode of documenting and sharing their projects – in fact they may have been able to simply add a new page to their existing blog!

Once the pandemic hit and we entered a period of remote learning, I had to shift gears and develop a challenge that individual students could work on at home, with whatever materials they had available. I decided to have them design Rube Goldberg Machines (Joseph’s Machines offers some brilliant examples). Students were responsible to provide weekly updates in our class meetings, though few were willing to really engage in deep conversation about what was shared or offer each other suggestions. Rather than only having students verbally share in a class meeting, recording weekly updates in a blog could allow students to be more thoughtful in what they communicate about their projects and promote peers to offer deeper reflections and feedback as they share ideas throughout the week. Encouraging students to spend more time outside of class thinking about science is never a bad thing.

I am a mentor for our school’s Science Club and a large part of that role is helping students prepare for the annual Science Olympiad (SCIOLY), where teams of up to 15 students compete in a total of 23 ‘events’ covering a myriad of science-related fields. If you are a science teacher and haven’t heard about this, I highly recommend you look into it. SCIOLY is a great opportunity for students to get exposure to many science topics not in most standard curriculums and to develop science skills beyond the traditional classroom experience. The events come in three different flavors – test events, which as the name implies requires students to prepare for and take an exam on a given subject; lab events, which allow the students to demonstrate various laboratory skills; and my personal favorite, the build events, which require students to design a solution to an engineering challenge ahead of time and demonstrate its functionality on the day of competition. We encourage each team to maintain event binders with all of their plans of their designs and research they have collected in preparation of their tests. Blogging could be an alternate to these binders, as it allows for the quick connection of many outside resources, allows for quality documentation of projects (many build events require logs to demonstrate design testing), and encourages ongoing dialogue. It should be noted that some events actually allow participants to bring a printed notebook or binder into the event with them, so a hard copy is still desirable. That said, this would be a great tool for students to collect and organize their research.

As I researched using blogs to support classroom learning, I explored a number of different platforms, but ultimately decided to utilize WordPress as it seemed to have a fairly intuitive interface, training resources available, a free hosting option, and has the potential allow for growth if I decide to maintain this blog after completing this course. Ultimately, I don’t know that it would be the most friendly option to use with students in my classes. I teach in a ‘Google District’ and using the Google-backed Blogger.com would probably be a more natural direction to go. However, there were some features that I found lacking (I spent considerable time trying to upload my own photo for the header, but was never able to get the sizing/format right so that it didn’t blur over). Given the fact that I appreciate photography, would like to customize my blog with photos I have taken, and would likely be incorporating photos into sample posts for my students to use as a model, I decided to move on for the sake of this project. I also stumbled across numerous warnings of Google’s history for dropping support for certain projects, and wanted to host my blog somewhere that was specifically dedicated to maintaining this service. If students were investing time in developing a long term project like this, I would want the same security for them.

A greater challenge to implementing this in my class would be the importance of protecting student data, as well as the need to monitor student activity online. Student privacy is very serious, and I would need to look further into what steps could be taken to ensure that the blogging platform treats student data securely. I am also not sure that having a totally open platform would work in my situation, due to the need for constant monitoring, and would prefer to utilize a system that allowed communication between all members of the school community, but prevented interaction with outside parties.

Due to the aforementioned challenges, I am unlikely to have my students making blogs in class in the very near future. That said, I could see myself maintaining the blog as a resource to share observations of physics phenomena that I see in everyday life. Physics is an exciting topic to study because it seeks to explain the physical world in which we live – it is relevant to everything! I am naturally curious and love to learn more about ‘how the world works’. I find that the more I learn, the more questions I have, which I believe is a healthy place to be as a learner. I hope to inspire a similar curiosity in my students, and perhaps this blog could be an avenue for me to share more of the ‘awesomeness’ that I observe in the world around me every day.