Guide Lines to Using Reflective Blogs in Learning

Here are the guidelines I personally came up after reflecting on (Wei's 2010) paper: 

1- Teachers should use social media to let  students communicate with people outside class intelligibly and gain confidence and real life practice. 

2- Merely uploading reading materials and other resources on mediums such as Moodle without the involvement of students does not promote learner centered experiences.

3- Tasks must be carefully designed to fulfill students’ needs and engage them.

4- Is the goal of the blog socializing or reflecting? The answer minimizes the frustration for the lack of peer feedback! If the blog is for socializing, peers comments must be required and assessed. The topics could be more relevant to people outside the class to expand the readers circle. If the goal is reflecting, skills like self analyzing, visual note taking, use of personal photo diaries and written reflections could be more highlighted. 

5- When students reflect on their English learning experience, they will have a historical archive of their progress. They can go back, reflect and fix some grammar and word choice mistakes. They will remember more of what they have learned and can always refer back to it. It is like keeping learners' dairies. 

6- Teachers must stop treating English as an alien creature and actually focus on the efficient meaningful use through out the whole learning experience( project based learning).

7- Reading difficulties that  students face and how they overcome them can improve educators’ performance and elevate the leaning experience 

8- Blogs can be used to establish self identity from design, color, content and so on.

9- Losing content while clicking on publish is common so students must be warned. 

10- Frequent posting is more effective.

11- Ask students whether they learn better privately without the pressure of criticism or by comparing their work with others and competing. Students with similar tendencies can be encouraged to work together. I personally prefer that we share blogs; we will reach a better understanding of the concepts given that way.

12- If the blogs are made to socialize, less written content should be promoted to make things more appealing.

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5uvbhS1Jyw

This video gives further suggestions to promote and use reflective learning. It starts by designing tasks that require reflecting. Laura Olson Bermudez, the creator of this video, stresses the use of this technique in online classes to ensure students' engagement in the learning process. She highlights the advantages of commenting on each others' content to promote engagement in what she describes as a ''safe, flexible, asynchronous environment.'' The last sentence justifies why blogs of all the other VLEs.

References: 

Zhang, Wei. "Blogging for Doing English Digital: Student Evaluations."Computers and Composition (2010): 266-83.