Emma’s 1st blog 11.01.21
Emma Morton’s 1st Blog
11th January 2021
This is my first ever blog. Will it work?
I live in Nairobi and I am a French and Spanish teacher. My most recent job was as Deputy Head Academic at a British Curriculum school. I worked at the school for 10 years, 5 as Deputy. I left the job because my father became very ill in Scotland and also all my children had moved on from the school. They are now at Durham University and Fettes College. I am currently waiting for my new job as Curriculum Adviser to start. the idea is to overhaul the curriculum of three schools, starting with the Kindergarten, all the up to the secondary school and the final A level years. Due to COVID 19, the job didn’t get going, as schools were closed from March 2020 until this week.
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Hi Emma and welcome to blogging for IDEL!
Thanks for the introduction and I’m sorry to hear about your father. That sounds like an interesting job in renewing the curricula across multiple schools.
The blog provides an opportunity for an open reflective dialogue between the two of us. It’s almost like a cross between keeping a diary and having a chat with a lecturer at the end of a class. This means that your ideas don’t have to be fully formed, and properly argued and fully evidenced (though it’s fine if they are!) in your posts. So don’t be afraid to be speculative and just record your immediate thoughts on what is happening. I will, however, make comments on good academic writing practice where I think this will be helpful, especially as we move closer towards the assignment.
You might want to consider scheduling time to make your blog entries. Around two or three entries a week is ideal. They don’t necessarily have to be very long; often there’s an excellent ‘nugget’ in a two-line entry that can be picked up again later. You might also want to be experimental – you don’t have to submit every entry for assessment, so if you change your mind that’s OK. You might find audio, video, images, hyperlinks etc to help you to express your ideas – so don’t be afraid to have some fun in the process.
I’ll check in on the blogs once or twice each week. So you should be hearing from me fairly regularly, but it might be a couple of days between your post and my response. I’ll add comments (as here) and comment on anything of particular interest and I’ll definitely be reading them all. You don’t have to reply to my comments, but you can if you want.
You can set your blog up to send you an email notification when a comment has been made. Just go to Dashboard/ Settings/ Discussion and select your preferred options for “Email me whenever”. Around week 5-6 we’ll have a mid-blog review, looking at the blog brief, the assessment criteria, what you have done so far and what you could do further when thinking about the assessment angle of the blog. I’ll be asking you to tell me what I can do further to help you, as well.
While the blog is set to be viewable by just ourselves, you can also allow all specific posts to be viewable by all students and staff on the course. This is described in the Technologies handbook here. Also, someone else will look at the final version of your blog in order to moderate my marking.
Anyway, well done for getting started and I look forward to reading more – I do particularly enjoy this aspect of the course. Any questions, please do email me directly at peter.evans@ed.ac.uk (or you can send me a message on the Moodle site).
Thank you for reading my first blog. I have to confess that I clicked submit before finishing it!
I have a some questions. The blog system is for us to interact; I like that. However, I will also be assessed on my blogs? Which ones? Every one I post, or just certain ones?
My understanding of Week 1 is that I garner fellow student opinions /critiques on the Manifesto via the forums. I then write three blogs which will be assessed by you. Is that correct?
How do I get teacher input from you, or is that not your role? Whilst there are a lot of interesting comments on the forum, there is also a vast amount, which in practical terms I cannot read in its entirety. I plan to cherry pick, but I would also like to occasionally pick your brains and ask for guidance and direction. Can I do that? What means of communication should I use? Blog? Email? Is that discourse continually assessed? What has prompted me to ask is a paragraph from the Manifesto, which has made me smile:
“In the context of digital education, and where learning is emphasized over teaching, it is often assumed that subject knowledge is most efficiently delivered by video lecture, podcast, or text resource, with course design being standardized and out sourced…. The primary role of the teacher then becomes to lubricate or facilitate the social and dialogic aspects of learning in, for example, discussion forums… The role of the teacher as subject matter expert and pedagogic architect is undermined” (The Manifesto for Online Teaching page 38)
I certainly wouldn’t want this to be the case!
I want to take full advantage of your expertise, as well as the expertise of my fellow students, and how do I most effectively and efficiently go about that?
Yours,
Emma
No worries, that happens to us all!
Yes, the blog is assessed – see page 12 of the course guide. What gets assessed is what is published on your blog on 5 April, so you can remove/ hide posts just before then if you like. To be honest, very few students do this as weaker posts help in demonstrating the development of you knowledge and understanding as the course progresses. The blog is assessed as a whole – rather than each post being given a mark and these added up – so a short, throw-away post or an experiment in multimodality that didn’t quite work would not necessarily loose you marks as you may well be demonstrating attainment fo the assessment criteria elsewhere. My feedback will include suggestions on ways to strengthen your blog as a whole throughout the course. So your posts on three statements from the Manifesto will get feedback from me and will contribute to the overall assessment of your blog but you won’t be receiving a particular mark for them. I hope that makes sense.
This blog is the place for a one-to-one discussion about the course. The discussion boards can be difficult to manage and most students skim the threads and will maybe engage with only one or discussions each week. Keeping up with your blogging is key as this is the assessed activity. So once you’ve completed any course activities each week, you can engage with the discussion boards as much as they prove useful – don’t feel a particular obligation to post to the boards constantly. There’s lots of experience and knowledge coming from your fellow students and I’m sure you’ll have lots to contribute too but to be successful on the course, it is important to keep a consistent blogging schedule.
Each block of the course is led by particular tutors and the best way to raise any questions of points with them is mainly through the discussion boards. Otherwise, I will be a consistent presence through the course – I’m not sure I would choose to call myself a lubricant but that sums up my role pretty effectively!
I hope that helps and do let me know of any further question about the course.