Tip Sheet

During week 6 of Collaborative Communities in E-Learning I worked with a partner to create a tip sheet for students commenting on classmates' Edublogs. We chose Edublogs because it is a free resource that an online instructor could use if their course management system did not have blogging capabilities. Blogging allows students to reflect on their learning and make connections to other resources and issues; student comments on classmates' blogs can take these reflections and connections even deeper for both blogger and commenter. Here is our Tip Sheet, which is also attached as a .pdf:

Module 6

Tipsheet: Adding comments to Edublogs

Eric Beckman and Lenore Webster

Why do we comment?

  • Students in this course will comment on classmates’ blog entries
  • Commenting on other students’ blogs is an important aspect of Course 123. Students receive feedback on their reflections, and commenters create new connections to the course content.

How do we comment?

  • Find the heading of the blog post you would like to comment on
    • Carefully and critically read the post
  • Click on the “comment” link which can usually be found below the title of the post
  • To leave a comment you need to be logged into your Edublog account. It is advisable that you use your school email address for this account. After the first time that you comment you will be remembered in the Edublogs software.
  • You will need to retype the coded word provided to prevent spam
  • Click on comment and you’re finished

Writing quality comments is similar to quality posting in forum discussions:

  • Engage your classmate’s post by referring directly to at least one of their ideas
  • Make connections to the resources used during the week and to other content online

Reflection: My partner, Lenore, made two important updates to our commenting tip sheet: changing red text and lines to blue and creating effective and ineffective model comments. She did this based on feedback from our instructor. The change from red to blue is important because people with red/green color deficiency would not see the red as highlighted. I had used red initially simply because it is the default color for marking up images captured by Jing, now called SnagIt. I have made a mental note to avoid this in the future.