Blogs in Teacher Education
This chapter examines the content of written blog postings of students enrolled in a face-to-face course focusing on literacy assessment methods and practice for Pre-Service Teachers (PST) seeking elementary teaching certification. The purpose of the study was to examine the transcription of the students' postings and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) to look for the three types of elements that comprise the Community of Inquiry according to as well as the examination of broader themes and trends across the data (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Data included blog posts from a 15-week semester with a total of 702 combined posts and comments from a total of 40 undergraduate students. Data were analyzed using the constant-comparative method () and the framework of the Community of Inquiry Model (). Students engaged in various levels of cognitive stages of inquiry while also building on and developing social presence throughout the course. Teacher presence also guided the social construction of knowledge throughout the course. Examination of the teacher presence suggests that the instructor needed to provide more scaffolding in modeling evidence-based practice and problem-solving on the blog as students did not always connect their practice to evidence-based or text-based support.