Blogging as a teaching tool

In the context of the digitalization and informatization of higher education, the growth of students’ independent work demands researchers to search for suitable teaching tools to organize it effectively based on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and focused on the professional development of future university graduates.

According to the analysis of scientific and pedagogic literature has shown that one of such tools is a student blog, a website with profession-related content written by a student for a specific amount of time. Despite the high potential of blogging in organizing students’ independent work, the lack of methodology for their use in the professional training of future teachers is evident.

The obvious question is what is the use of a blog and how it can help? The use of blogging as a Web technology in teaching is not only the fact that it is effective when students have active interaction with each other. It is also helpful because the modern "digital" generation of students has the basic skills to work with websites and web applications. These skills include fast adaptability to new technologies, the ability to create and keep a profile in social media, and teamwork skills with online interaction.

However, two features of ICT use must be emphasized. Firstly, even though the new generation of students is called digital natives, it does not at all mean that it is a generation of digital learning natives. Even if it seems to teachers that most of the students embrace new digital means much faster than themselves, this does not hold for all the students, as some of them experience difficulties adapting to basic software. More than that, the ease of embracing these technologies drops as their complexity grows. Therefore, as e- teaching experts recommend, it should not be taken for granted that students have all the skills developed to work with any type of ICTs. Instead, one has to make sure that, to perform a certain task, each student has a sufficient level of skills developed for this.

Secondly, one must remember that language e-learning tools, blogging in particular, cannot and will not replace human face-to-face interaction. Nonetheless, these and other ICTs combined with the appropriate conditions and methods of organizing students’ learning could form a complex learning environment where students can practice their language skills.

Thus, blogging is the optimal tool for creating such an environment for language skills development. Students, then, have to publish their content only in a foreign language, while communicating with each other via the comments section to their blog posts.

Objective

The main purpose of the study is to find out how the potential of student blogging can be used to organize the independent work of students being trained to become teachers.

Literature review

Unlike social media tools such as Facebook and Instagram where there is a high chance for students to send and receive messages in their native language, in blogging, if the learning around it is organized properly, the number of such messages can be minimized. This is important because the posts and messages in a native language are interpreted by interacting parties as an asocial behaviour and a lack of literacy towards other members of the language environment. In such a learning activity as blogging the language is viewed only as a tool for performing a communication task.

The main features of blogging that help to discern it from other websites are as follows:

Chronology: Each blog post contains the date and time of its publication, with the latest posts at the top of the webpage and the first posts at the bottom.

Restriction to one topic: Initially, a blog was supposed to be an online diary of a user, but today most authors fill their blogs with content limited by one specific domain or topic.

Social orientation: Each blog is focused on a specific group of readers, the audience, with respect to which the content of the publication is chosen.

Commenting: If the author enables this function, readers can leave comments on his or her blog page asking questions and sharing their opinions about the content of these posts.

Teaching activity, while student blogging, can be as follows:

• Encouraging students to do their exercises, reminding them about the deadlines and goals of this job, praising and using other incentives for timely and high-quality performance
• Providing relevant and authentic content in a foreign language, in some cases – evaluating the quality of materials chosen by students themselves
• Constant improvement of teaching techniques
• Moreover, it is necessary to let students know that blogging as a teaching tool not only makes acquiring a foreign language easier but also develops critical thinking, writing skills and creative abilities.

Suggests the following list of necessary actions a student has to take when preparing for and keeping a blog:

• Choose a topic and a goal for having a blog.
• Determine necessary steps-tasks allowing to reach this goal.
• Search, read, translate, analyze and structure the information based on the algorithms, techniques and tools provided by a teacher.
• Create a blog and fill it with the multimedia content that would be most appropriate to its topic and goal.
• Reflect on the content of one’s blog regularly based on the criteria provided by a teacher and, whenever necessary, make changes in planning or choosing the content.
• Adjust the level of exposure to one’s blog and enable or disable the comments feature.
• Compare and discuss the results of the work with peers, make conclusions and necessary changes in the process of blogging.

For successful blogging a teacher also must:

1. Provide students with instructions for creating a blog and filling it with content [text, images, audio, video]
2. Organize student blogging as a long-term activity: less teaching the language, more monitoring and identifying the systematic mistakes in the use of linguistic means
3. However possible, organize peer-to-peer interaction, as our-of-classroom work in particular
4. Engage other teachers and/or experts in the blogs’ topics with a sufficient level of professional expertise and language training
5. Depending on the goals of the work, establish minimum restrictions on the choice of style and use of linguistic means to give students more freedom to explore their blog’s domain
6. Help students to adjust notifications about other students’ new posts using RSS or "Newsfeed" embedded in a blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogspot.

Among the advantages of blogging the researchers mention their usability, availability and minimum expenses when introducing it into the learning process. Furthermore, blogging as an ICT tool can be implemented with any of the online platforms most of which support a free version.

Thus, blogging does not require a large amount of knowledge and skills because the software developers of the most popular platforms are usually focused on the end-users who possess only basic ICT skills. For example, to create a blog, the only thing that is required from a user is to have a device with Internet access. Therefore, in the context of our research, blogging is considered to be the optimal tool based on which it is possible to organize students’ independent work.

Methodology

• To assess the quality of student blogs, several criteria were developed and approved using the method of group expert assessment. The blogs of future teachers are assessed according to the following criteria:
• Grammar and vocabulary: guide the development of students’ language skills and practice of the knowledge and skills they acquired in their classes.
• Logical coherence: encourages the clear and logically coherent expression of ideas on the chosen professional topic to help the blog’s audience [e.g., the teachers and native speakers involved, other student-bloggers, other Internet users] to understand its contents.
• Regularity of blogging: helps the teacher to manage students’ independent work and motivate them toward consistent deliberate practice.
• Having links to the sources used: necessary for the transparency of students’ independent work, its management by the teacher, and assessment by the experts.
• Independent thinking [absence of plagiarism]: prohibits students from copy-pasting information from the Internet and encourages their independent thinking.
• The Ability to use professional terminology adequate to the communication situation focuses students’ attention on the development of their professional competence which makes it easier for them to communicate on a professional topic [both inside and outside the classroom].

Relevance of the blog’s topic and its posts: allows students to choose the blog’s topic (from the given list or one’s own) which :

a) motivates a student to do exercises regularly and at a high quality

b) is limited by the range of possible topics within the curriculum of their training

At the end of their independent work, each of the students assessed both one’s own blog (self-assessment) and two of the other students’ blogs (peer-assessment). After that, the survey is organized to ask students about blogging as a teaching tool and the ways it can be used to organize students’ learning.

Blogging methodology

The key component of this technology is the authors’ methodology of profession-oriented student blogging. It consists of three stages: preparation, activity and reflection.

The preparation stage implies that a student creates a blog and chooses its topic, which is either formulated by the student or chosen from the list. This list is offered by the teacher and must be composed with the curriculum requirements in mind.

Then, at the same stage, students in cooperation with the teacher design their individual trajectories for their independent work. There are two types of possible trajectories: one is scientific which is used to train future masters’ and PhD students, the other is engineering which is chosen by future engineers and technicians at manufacturing facilities. Within each trajectory, each of the students, under the guidance of their teacher, selects authentic information sources which would lay the foundation of their future blog posts, makes a scheduled plan of their publication, and defined the optimal conditions (time, place, method) of one’s independent work.

Moreover, at the preparation stage, the entrance test is conducted to identify the initial level of a student’s competence development (in the context of the thesis research, it is the professional language competence) and make an evidence-based choice of one’s individual educational trajectory. To conduct such a test, a specific set of profession-oriented tasks was designed, which includes the translation of an English text on students’ professional topic, it is abstract writing, and creative problem solving that implies the search and analysis of scientific and technical information on the Internet.

The activity stage means the actual students’ independent work of blogging. Once the blog’s topic is chosen, students study the authentic foreign-language content in different formats (text, audio, video), analyze it and based on it prepare and publish their blog posts. Apart from that, each of the students composes a thesaurus of professional terms used in one’s blog. After the students’ independent work, they prepare and then give a presentation demonstrating the results of their work. The teacher’s role at this stage is to motivate students and guide their regular blogging.

At the reflection stage, the current results of students’ profession-oriented blogging are analyzed by their teacher. Final results are assessed by the expert group, which, among other things, determines how these results correlate with the goals of independent work, based on the criteria above.

At this stage, the teacher organizes regular feedback with students after looking through and analyzing the contents of their blog posts. Also, the mid-course and the final presentation of the results of students’ independent work is organized by the teacher. As a result of this stage, if necessary, certain changes can be made in students’ trajectories to optimize their independent work and increase its quality.

The teacher also encourages student bloggers, foreign-language teachers, practitioners in the field, and native speakers to leave comments in students’ blogs. As students’ reviews show, their very understanding of the fact that their blog posts are read and commented on motivates them to work more and better.

The expected results of this independent students’ work are stimulation of their self-learning and their transition to a higher level of competence development.

Results

• Their writing skills are not sufficient enough
• They experience difficulties when preparing profession-related content for their blog posts independently, by themselves
• They are reluctant to show the results of their work publicly

Analysis of the research results showed that the assessments of Vocational Training students (self- assessment and peer-assessment) correlate with each other and identify a high level of quality of their independent work. However, it is important to point out that most students did not receive the highest score in the criterion "Independent thinking.”

The results of the survey demonstrated that 90% of the future vocational teachers would like to use blogging as a teaching tool in their future teaching jobs. This implies how relevant it is for a teacher to have blogging skills and the ability to organize students’ independent work based on blogging.

As a result of profession-oriented blogging, the students are asked to share their opinions about how important it is to use blogging to organize students’ independent work from both perspectives, as students and teachers. The future teachers have concluded that:

According to the students, these difficulties can be overcome if:

• The independent work of profession-oriented blogging is not an occasional, but systematic and regular activity
• Individual consultations and the management of this independent work are organized by the teacher on a regular basis
• The blog topics not only are focused on the professional activity but also require creativity from students
• The content of blog posts does not duplicate other learning activities, and future teachers use blogging as a way to share the information about the work they did and discuss its results, not as a type of reporting about other assignments.
• Future teachers also have pointed out that blogging is an effective tool to communicate certain types of information.
• The students believe that the ability to communicate with other students online enables them to conduct surveys and do research so that they quickly receive necessary feedback. As a result, profession-oriented blogging, according to most Vocational Training students, stimulates the development of their professional teaching competence.
• At the same time, thinking of a blog as an effective tool to organize students’ independent work, one of the students has emphasized how difficult it is to write blog posts on a regular basis claiming that "one gets tired of it quickly". This opinion proves that it would be reasonable to use blogging for independent work not on an obligatory basis, but only as one of the possible activities that students can choose voluntarily for their additional professional development.

Conclusion

It is also worth noting that, according to future teachers, having blogging skills and the ability to organize with it their future students’ learning creates many opportunities for an educator. A teacher who is a confident user of ICTs and has experience in blogging can organize students’ feedback effectively, as well as their independent, remote work. This is especially critical today when the teaching community searches for ways to adapt learning and communication with their students in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the optimal information and communication technologies for organizing students’ independent work is blogging. Furthermore, a teacher with blogging skills could use this tool to improve one’s image and position oneself as a modern and competent specialist.

It is also important that students should think independently and express their opinion. The ‘independent thinking’ cannot be neglected and should take appropriate steps to help students develop their writing and blogging skills, it is highly recommended to motivate them to take responsibility for their learning and be proactive, create the space for them to express their opinion more often and build their own projects.