Why blogging?
Well as I said yesterday, I have a clearer idea in mind about why I want students to blog and what I want them to do on their blogs.
Last year, my idea was to use the blogs as a place for students to discuss the literature we were reading, especially focusing on an overarching theme of the American Dream as we made our way through American Literature. It had some success, but not much.
This year my goal has changed. I’ve really been rethinking how I am teaching writing this year and emphasizing writing much more in my classes. I spent the summer reading about teaching writing, especially Deborah Dean’s book, Strategic Writing: The Writing Process and Beyond in the Secondary English Classroom, Tom Romano’s book, Clearing the Way: Working with teenage writers, and Inside Out by Dan Kirby et al. I’ve decided to make writing a daily thing in my class and, staying with Dean’s idea, work much more on teaching writing strategies. In the past, much of the writing in my classes has been the end-of-unit-tell-me-what-you-know type of writing, rather than real writing for real purposes.
As part of making the writing a little more real, I want students to write for an audience larger than just me. Here is where blogs will be used. Rather than blogs being a place for their initial thinking, musing, or chatting, I’m having students use blogs as a place to put revised work, work that they are proud of and would like to share with the world. This is the place for taking the rough work they’ve done in class or in their journals and reworking and rethinking the ideas to share with others. We’ll see how it goes.
Last week students wrote personal narratives, shared them in small groups and now will be posting their revised drafts onto their blogs. Then they’ll have a chance to comment in writing on each others’ writing. I’m hoping for the best!
Back to blogging
Well, it’s been ages since I started this blog and then abandoned it. Last year, I started using blogs with my students, and then pretty much abandoned that, too. We were using blogger to house our blogs and I didn’t have much success with that, mostly because of our school’s website administration. There were many days where we’d go to the computer lab, only to have the site blocked, or partially blocked. It was very frustrating.
Also, I had students register their own accounts last year and got some very interesting and inappropriate usernames. And then they forgot their passwords and had to reregister. And, to be honest, I hadn’t really thought through exactly what I wanted students to do on their blogs. When I started having problems with blogger, I had students move here to learnerblogs. That worked better with our computers at school, but still things never really went anywhere.
This year, I’m trying again. I’ve found a new place to blog, and have a more clear idea of what I want to do. So far, I have eighty of my 100 students blogging over at 21publish, and soon all will be online. There isn’t much up yet except brief posts to let me know they all know how to use the blog, but more should be up soon.
I’ve only just found 21publish, but so far I like it a lot, for several reasons. First, it works at my school. But more importantly, instead of just a bunch of blogs that people need to seek out and find, all blogs are set up as part of a community. Actually, I set up each blog, assigning passwords and usernames. I also have complete control over the blogs. If a student posts something inappropriate, I can delete or modify the post. I can delete a user’s entire account, in fact. Although it was more upfront work on my part to set up, I like having that control.
But what I really like about the community is that when anyone views one of the blogs, there is a drop-down menu to go directly to each other blog. And my homepage for it is a kind of portal that shows active blogs, most recent posts, and other information, kind of like a miniature aggregator all set up already, allowing connections to develop between bloggers easily. So far I’m really happy with 21publish. Hopefully blogging will work better this year.
I also have a more clear plan for what I want to do with blogging this year, tied up very close to my re-thinking of writing instruction this year. I’ll post about that soon.
