"Blogging is about reading and writing.
Literacy is about reading and writing.
Blogging is about literacy." (SupportBlogging.com, 2010)
Although I have limited experience teaching reading and writing, I can immediately see how blogging can be used to apply to these areas. I have taught some reading classes, and I learned a basic process to assess comprehension.
1. Students do a reading assignment
2. Students discuss in their own words what they remember reading
3. Students write in their own words what they read
A blog allows for feedback from both teacher and other students. This can be both a positive and negative experience for some students. If the student is proud of their work they will want this public audience. Positive feedback will encourage more writing and thinking. However, if a student knows that most of the class is better at writing, they may tend to shrink from this kind of public exposure and express themselves even less. Initial blogging may need to be free from criticism of form and focus mainly on content. There may also be a way of keeping initiation into blogging as anonymous except to the teacher. Teachers will need to monitor the appropriate nature of student blogs that are available to the class as a whole.
A teacher can use a blog and written communication to students that can be accessed from any internet linked computer. The teacher may also pose discussion questions for voluntary or mandatory feed back that can later be discussed with a class as a whole. Students are certainly accessing and writing to blogs on a social basis regularly. Educational uses would need to be in the protection of a district or school firewall and perhaps only made "public" to members of a specific class. Again, usernames can keep this interaction anonymous to other students. However, I can see the danger of that if any bullying takes places that a teacher cannot control.
There is the clear potential for giving students the excitement of expressing their own voice in a public forum. This also leads to a greater engagement in the particular topic or subject area. I teacher at an elementary school where the general literacy levels are quite low. This is probably part of the reason that social interaction (talking) is often quite aggressive and loud for some. They struggle to get their "voice" heard. If they are not readers and writers then the competition to have a sense of empowerment is huge. I still think my students would use blogging to post media work with a limited amount of text to tell their stories.
That being said, there is a need for some basic literacy to apply blogging as it is mostly a form of written expression. For middle and high school classes literature theme discussion and posting of short stories or poetry can give great power to individual voices. Most students want to be heard and need to in a safe environment. Students can also take group responsibility for their learning by posting notes from lectures to a blog. Our text book mentioned using a rotation of "scribes" so the whole class can take part. When a level of comfort and safety is established even the class notes can be a source of discussion and deepening the level of understanding and thinking. Group discussion of math word problems can also take place in this way.
SupportBlogging.com. (2010, January 8). Educational Blogging. Retrieved from
http://supportblogging.com/Educational+Blogging
Jordan, do your students feel that their blogs aren't worth the effort if they're not being graded? I'm finding some of my college kids don't want to do any writing unless they're going to get a grade for it -- even though we know that they learn more when they write. So there's a tension in the process: I just want to assess how well they're internalizing the material but they're just trying to get a good grade....
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