Integration of Web 2.0 in the Classroom CEP 812

Created by: Jean-Claude Aura Date: April 2009 Page 1

With the inception of blogs, educators have witnessed major changes in student achievement. Blogs

are not just a novelty. They are a way for people to communicate their thoughts to a worldwide

audience. Hence, student engagement and motivation have increased, leading to better academic

achievements that require higher-order thinking skills. Let’s see which instructional strategies would

work well and which wouldn’t with blogs.

Deductive Strategy: This strategy calls for students’ straightforward thinking. They literally see

something and repeat the same process to gain further experience. This strategy works well with

blogs. Let’s say the tourism industry isn’t doing well in our country. Students are assigned the role of

tour guides and have to describe a couple of interesting places to tourists in order to promote tourism.

The teacher would then post a blog describing a particular place so students get an idea what

information is required when describing places of interests to tourists. After that, students proceed by

posting their own blogs describing other places in the same way the teacher did in his/her blog.

Inductive Strategy: This strategy exposes students to a particular process and requires them

to come to a conclusion as to how the process was realized. This strategy works equally well with

blogs. Let’s say the objective is to teach the past tense form. The teacher can write about a celebrity’s

past and have students figure out how the past tense is formed and that there are 2 types of verbs.

Then, students write about their favorite celebrity using the past tense.

Scaffolding Strategy: In this strategy, students are provided some kind of support at the start,

which is taken away gradually as they proceed towards mastering a particular skill. As the name of the

strategy suggests, the teacher and students will have to constantly send their work back and forth in

order to achieve a desired objective. This is better done using Google Docs, where students can share

their work with the teacher much more practically than when posting a blog.

Metaphor Strategy: This strategy works well with blogs since teachers can practically post a

blog on any idea they would like to use as a metaphor.

Gizmos: I don’t think blogs are useful here. This strategy requires students to interact with the

educational object. A web-based instructional object such as a StAIR would definitely do a much better

job.