Blogging allows students to communicate with an outside audience, which helps them to fix grammar and raise the quality of their writing. It helps to have an arrangement where the class is paired with another class in a different location. Some blogs are designed to support learning a specific subject such as a foreign language or math. Some blogs are fully public, and others are accessible to a limited private audience. Teachers have to be mindful of student security, so full names are not used. Students may use an initial or a pseudonym. Ways that teachers can use blogs in the classroom include: post a prompt twice a week and ask students to respond by a certain day, or have students peer review the work of a classmate and give suggestions. The teacher can review the comments to approve them before posts are published to make sure the comments are appropriate. Other ideas: appoint a weekly blog team to report the class news for the week. Parents and students can respond to the news, or have students respond to a reading that they did, or make a claim with no supporting details and have students search out supporting details from reliable links and add them to the blog, post a link to a site and ask students to critique the site including bias and validity, post a link to current event and ask students to create commentary on how this affects their local community.
How might blogging present specific challenges in the classroom? Teachers need to make sure that if students are publishing their writing to a wider audience, they need to meet criteria for effective and appropriate writing, students need to cite sources, read web materials using critical thinking skills, and how to use the comment tool. According to Michael Peters, the purpose of blogs is to connect with an audience. Not only is the writing published to an audience, the audience responds with comments. This develops a community. It is a good place for people to explore their identities and have a voice. Students can link media and other content that they have created. Blogging should not just consist of the teacher and student in a conversation. Minimally, it should include peers, and the conversation needs to continue inside the classroom.
Teachers need to establish norms and expectations for each activity, including: criteria for the product, how will the activity be assessed, norms for behavior including manners and ethical standards. It’s a good idea to include expectations for multimedia. Ideas for finding an audience include: families, Twitter and Facebook friends, PLN. It’s not a good idea to assume that a blog is private if it’s publicly accessible. Students and teachers should read blogs to see examples before actually publishing their own. Will Richardson describes how he uses blogs with his high school students to give them real life experience creating a useable tool to share with an authentic audience. The students created an online study guide for The Secret Life of Bees. Not only did the study guide have more than 2 million hits from other students, the author of the book, Sue Monk, came on board and added her own response to their work. Mr. Richardson set up a partnership between his students and students in other schools to facilitate collaboration.
The ISTE Standards for Students include Communication and Collaboration. In this Standard, students “use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.” Blogging also gives students practice in information fluency: “ Locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media.”
I am looking forward to using blogs with my students. We all need to practice our writing skills, especially in today’s world. Having the skills to communicate in a blog appropriately, following ethical standards, expressing meaningful ideas, responding to other people, and so on, is very important. There are many challenges facing teachers when they include blogging in our instructional plans.
Safety is my first concern. I need to make sure that the blogging is either within a safe network, or there are safeguards to protect student identities on public sites. In both cases, the blogging must be monitored by the teacher or designated responsible adults.
My second concern is to make sure that there is an actual community out in the blogosphere to blog with. The educators in charge need to do the footwork necessary to identify an appropriate match for students to communicate with. This isn’t easy for me, as evidenced by my own blog, which has few hits at this point. This will be a problem for me to solve for my students and for myself as I expand my blogging.
I’m collaborating with some educators to create a critical thinking curriculum for high school and college students. We want the participants to be truth seekers and to evaluate and weigh their options. We are expecting the participants to blog as they proceed through the courses. This will make the courses more interesting and help the students to reflect on their ideas, as well as challenge their thinking. For example, we have a mini-course on the topic of leadership. We want the students to understand what it takes to be a leader, choose a cause that has meaning to them, take a position of leadership and plan a course of action. This kind of learning is much more effective when a student has the opportunity to share ideas with peers and reach out to an authentic community who would benefit from their action plan. The students will need to practice the ISTE Standards of collaborating with a community, and contribute to the learning of others. They will have to evaluate the value of different causes, and practice critical thinking to make sure that they are making an informed choice, and make sure that their sources are legitimate.
Blogging has risks, because it is difficult or impossible to prevent people from using the freedom to hurt others. On the other hand, blogging provides the opportunity for people to make a positive contribution to make the world a better place. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this tool.
References:
"Blog Basics" from Teachers First.com retrieved on November 24, 2013Dyck, Brenda “Log on to a Blog” Education World, accessed Nov. 22, 2013
Gilbert, Alorie, “Blogging 101- Weblogs Go to School” CNET News, Oct. 17, 2005
“ISTE Standards for Students”
Peters, Michael “Getting Classroom Blogging Right”-Tech in EDU posted Jan. 29, 2013
Richardson, Will, “New Jersey High School Learns the ABCs of Blogging”, The Journal, 06/01/2005, retrieved on 11/26/2013.