Saturday 17 March 2012

using blogs to support students

I thought I would write another post as a prompt for myself.
Bronwyn made a comment on my first post and gave me a link about using a blog http://tccnursing.multiply.com/video/item/1/Nursing_Scenario_1 as a reflection for student learning. Two weeks ago, I thought writing blogs was a bit of a fag and I wasn't sure about the usefulness of doing one. But now, after viewing the link that Bron sent me, I can now see just how useful it could be.

Our third year nursing students have 4 clinical placements in thier final year, with the last one being their elective prior to sitting state finals. One of the clinical placements is in primary health care (which I teach in). The students have 3-4 weeks in a primary care setting (e.g. practice nusruing, district nursing, prison nursing etc) with their placement being anywhere in NZ. I have supervised students in Stewart Island to Kaitaia. Although a few nurses stay in Dunedin for their placement, we decided that our supervision would be via the phone and thereby making it equal for all students.

Students are required to send a reflection on their practice via email to the lecturer once a week along with speaking to them on the phone. The blog link that Bron sent me leads me to a vision that all reflections are placed on the one site, with all students and lecturer commenting on them. That way the students would learn from each other and provide feedback to each other. All students would therefore learn about the various scopes of practice that nurses in primary care have.

1 comment:

  1. Laurie that sounds like a great idea, and a terrific learning opportunity for students. How will you manage the confidentiality issues for clients?

    One solution could be that each student could have an invitation only blog. Although this will take some initial setting up, if the students were in groups this wouldn't be so onerous, and would also mean that they have a more manageable workload getting around the group's blogs rather than all the class blogs. Encouraging them to add a gadget so each person can follow on email would enable them to receive alerts when blog posts are added. This will eliminate the need to go to each blog, and will save time for students and lecturers.

    Perhaps the role of the teachers is to summarise some of the key points from each student, on the class blog, so that each group gets a sense of the cases being discussed in other groups. What do you think of this idea, and what else could you do? How would this activity be scaffolded with students and staff?

    ReplyDelete