THE USE OF BLOGS FOR REGULATING AND MONITORING STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE OF ANCIENT GREEK GRAMMAR: A CASE STUDY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

The curricula of the Bachelor Degree in Classics, due to their nature, do not offer their students specific training in pedagogy/teaching or on how to use Information and Communication Technologies in learning activities. In this context, sometimes the students don’t manage to develop important competences, which, according to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), are necessary for their future occupation as secondary education teachers, such as the “digital competence”, for example. Moreover, it is widely accepted that university and college students use actively in their daily lives social networking applications and the Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, etc.). In addition, several studies have shown that the use of some of these tools in the teaching-learning process can work as an enriching and motivating factor for the students.
The present experience aims to introduce the use of blogs in the obligatory course "Greek Grammar", of the Bachelor Degree in Classics at the University of Barcelona in order to increase the students’ competences in managing and organizing their learning and to make their studies more attractive and adapted to the new learning tools and trends. To achieve this goal, students must create a personal blog by using any hosting platform (wordpress, blogger, blogspot, etc...) they prefer. During the creation, design and development of the blogs, students discover the possibilities of this tool for organizing and regulating their knowledge acquisition process through various activities and with the support of their instructors; simultaneously, the instructors achieve to realize a better monitoring of the students’ learning and use the blogs to improve the ongoing evaluation system of the course.
The teaching methodology followed in this experience considers primarily the active participation of students in the course activities. It also enables students to take advantage of the totality of the available online tools to interact with each other, so that they can formulate queries, answer questions and even work together and with their instructors.
We can therefore say that the present teaching experience strengthens the role of the students and focuses on the development of the learners’ autonomy, as well as on the creation of the necessary conditions for collaborative learning.
The very positive feedback and evaluation received from both students and instructors about the design of the “Greek Grammar” course with the use of blogs for regulating and monitoring students’ knowledge and for improving and enriching the existing ongoing evaluation system opens the door for using more actively technology in the rather conservative -in this sector- studies of Classics, adapting them to the teaching and learning tendencies of the EHEA.