My Middle School is using blogger (part of Google) as a platform for our students’ blogfolios. The blogfolio (term coined by Andrea Hernandez) is part blog and part digital portfolio. Students not only showcase their best work, but document their learning journey. A blogfolio shows student work at a particular moment in time (due to its chronological nature) with a reflective component to show evidence of growth and learning over time.
Using a blog as a platform amplifies the opportunities for:
- social learning
- for writing with a global audience in mind
- for receiving feedback, new perspectives and becoming a link in the chain of learning of oneself and others
- archiving information over time: organizing, linking, connecting, categorizing
One component of the blogging platform, that supports a strategic and pedagogical redefinition and transformation of learning are labels (as used in Blogger) or categories and tags (as in WordPress).
Blogs and labels are also about INFORMATION LITERACY. We are in the age of information overload. Our students will amass more and more digital information at a faster and faster rate. We have to prepare them to not only create it, but also to organize that information.
Labels/categories function as a tool:
- for searching
- for filtering
- for curating
- for organization
- of assessment over time.
Our students use the blogging platform as their hub for documenting and reflecting on their learning. It means that they do NOT have a separate blog for Math, another one for Humanities or P.E. All there work is on one blog. With time that means hundreds of blog posts in one school year and potentially thousands of posts over several years. When not organized well, this can become… well… a mess…
Students won’t be able to find a particular post or another , when selecting blog posts for their Student Led Conference. It will make it impossible to search for specific posts, when not choosing blog post titles containing specific, related keywords.
Teachers will spend more and more time having to look through hundreds of student blogs to find a post, created for their subject area. Instead they could have been subscribed (via RSS feed) to their subject specific category or tag, filtering like this other student blog posts irrelevant to their feedback or assessment.
Labeling becomes indispensable for bloggers. Being able to organize your work, tag it, categorize, group them and later on find them again IS PART OF INFORMATION LITERACY!
As our school (K-12) is slowly spreading blogfolios across all grade levels, we have to look a labeling as part of the “big picture”. How will we use the blog for growth over time? How do we facilitate connections and the learning process for specific skills?A reader of a blog, should be able to tell, by simply looking at the list of labels/categories what types of blog posts the author likes to write about.
When labeling, keep the following in mind:
Universal: It is important to keep labels/categories broad. When choosing a label/category, ask yourself if you will be blogging about this type of content again?… frequently?…. Think of your readers. Would a potential reader be interested in finding more blog posts like the one you just labeled with that category?
Less is more: The broader your labels, the less labels you will need in the future. The less labels, the easier for your reader to find items of interests.
Pre-set Labels: As a school community, we have pre-set labels, that we ask every students to choose from for EVERY blog post they publish. Grade Level and subject area labels are a must and the label “SLC” will be used, if a student chooses to highlight a particular post to present during their Student Led Conference. We are also asking students to label blog posts with the identified core values by the school.
Personalized Labels: Learning does not only happen in school during the pre-set hours of the school schedule. We are encouraging our students to document and reflect on the learning and the growth outside of the curriculum areas. Students will create (universal) labels for their out of school interests and learning that they choose to share on their blogs.
When left to their own devices, some label/category lists on student blogs have gone a little out of control. Hundreds of labels, when there are only 10 blog posts to date, do not help but hinder the information flow. I am recommending to be extra careful to not create the following labels/categories:
- Two versions of the same label. Ex. reflective and reflection. Try to stay consistent.
- Specific technology tools. Unless you are a pro at a specific tool and you envision to be writing regular posts about the mechanics, examples and tutorials about Photoshop, for example, do not label your posts with the tool you happened to use to create an image inserted into your post.
- No need to label your post with your name…. this is your blog… supposedly all posts are by you…unless you invite a guest blogger
- A specific book title. Although you might write two or three posts about a specific book, most likely you will move on to other books and never use the same book title label again. Better to use a label called “books” or “reading” in order to tie and connect with other posts about books you have read.
Examples of current label lists of our student blogfolios
I am looking to learn with all of you. How can we support our student blogs with a labeling system that guides students in learning to work, organize and curate their own digital information? The digital information created by our studnets (inside and outside of school) will jut keep growing exponentially! How are you teaching students to label their work on their individual blogs? Have you created a system for your class or your entire school to facilitate multi-year blogging? How are your librarians and media specialists getting involved?
Further resources about labeling
Thank you Silvia. Once again, you are out front of a topic that will grow as educators increase their discussions of writing for authentic audiences and of digital literacies. I am a proponent of every learner having a digital portfolio, as well as, a proponent of using blogs as evidence of learning and growth. Your emphasis on proper naming conventions is completely timely and appropriate. My recommendation would be to create pages (labels) for subject areas, learning competencies, or classes. Posts can be tagged with learning standards, teacher name, and topic. Assuming that the main body of the blog will be used for learning reflections and processes (formative), there should be a showcase page for exemplary products and evidence that satisfies summative assessment. We are promoting digital literacies by implementing iPads in a 1:1 program. One technique that some of our teachers are using is subscribing to student blogs using Flipboard. A class magazine is created that can be shared to classmates, parents, and other instructors for comments and further sharing. Here is my post highlighting this process and it’s virtues: http://rtschuetz.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-use-flipboard-with-student-blogs.html
I love this topic and I am interested in seeing the conversation that springs from this terrific post. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge of blogfolios.
Bob
@Robert
We have thought about using the “label feed” as a URL for pages as part of the layout, although this seems to me a substitution of the way static websites function. Learning to read,write and search with labels/categories/tags is part of digital literacy. We and our students have to be comfortable with the new structure.
Finding ways for teachers (and students as well) to keep up with all the different feeds is an important component (again part of digital literacy to be able to find, read and filter blog posts of interest). Flipboard (for tablets) and Feedly (also web based) are important tools.
Thank you for chiming in… let’s keep this conversation going.
Hello! First I love the creative thought behind the name of your blog!. I attend the University of South Alabama and we too use blogger to blog about our learning journey. One of our first articles was about information overload. Not only teaching our children how to pick whats good information but to know what information will help them with what they are researching. I like how the students have to use keywords in their title for other students to search for them and use the information as a resource.
@Alexis
The term blogging means so much more than substituting writing on a digital blog platform. So many emerging literacies are addressed as teachers and students push their work beyond basic reading and writing. I would like to advise you as a pre-service teachers, who has the opportunity to blog her learning journey, NOT to stop blogging because your class will be over after the semester and NOT to see it as a requirement, but as an opportunity to learn as you experience. You will be able to translate that experience for your own learning into your future classroom.
Thanks for sharing! Still trying to develop a better tagging/labeling system myself!
These are fantastic tips, and I particularly like your graphics. If it’s ok, I would love to use some of them with my own students to get them to label/tag better. It makes me think more closely about my tagging terms as well. I can see great potential for students to reflect and become more metacognitive about their learning through some individual and class discussions about what sorts of labels/tags to use. In my Humanities class, for example, I might talk with students about how we should label(categorize our studies that sometimes overlap with social studies and ELA. This could get them to recognize the standards/learning goals that they are demonstrating in their posted work.
@Paul
My work is licensed under Creative Commons (Attribution/Share Alike/Non Commercial). You are more than welcome to use the images under these conditions.
You are right. There is the possibility for teachers to use labeling/tagging/categorizing as a tool to promote deeper and critical thinking.
I wish we could all collaborate to flush the “hidden” talents of paying closer attention to the importance of a system as students are blogging about their learning.
No question that labels are the logical anchor required for retrieval in digital production. They offer a catalog, such as a library might produce. Developing a personal system is a critical thinking process that requires practice. It seems to me that the basket of synonyms currently utilized – keyword, label, category, tag – is confusing, especially for those who are not native English speakers. What might help students in organizing their products is a definition of terms and consistency in the language used.
I agree with Meryl. A blog legend makes so much sense. I am going to steal this concept and build an infographic that illustrates and defines the blogging basket. I will share upon completion. Thanks for the conversation and inspiration.
@Robert
Looking forward to the infographic. Are you familiar with blogging platforms beyond Blogger and WordPress… KidBlog, Weebly or Blogmeister? Do they have labeling as part of their structure? What terms do they use? What is the difference between categories and tags? When do you use what?
@Meryl
Good point. It does not help that Blogger and WordPress (the two biggest blogging platforms) use a different term for the same thing. Let’s work on a glossary of terms for a labeling system keeping our non-native English speakers in mind. 🙂
Thank you, This a great post. It is interesting that what librarians have been doing for ages for books is exactly what is needed for student bloggers. You are expecting your students to have Pre-set Labels; in the library world these are subject headings and there are books of them. Having said that subject headings when they got too prescribed didn’t match natural language and therefore became difficult for the layperson to use. As for broader vs narrower, I would say it depends on the amount of information that results from that broad category. Narrower categories bring fewer results and sometimes that is what you want if they are more on topic. They may want to give both for a particular entry depending. Anytime you can get students to use existing ones from other students making their tagging more uniform will also bring better results. You have really thought through this, it shows and everyone in your community will have an easier time finding what they need.