Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

My question today is (just in case you didn’t read the title of this post) why is it that we are even considering using blogs in the classroom? What is about this medium that makes it different or better then other mediums? The learning journal is nothing new. Teachers have been getting students to write this type of thing for years. So why is a blog a better then lets say just having them write an ongoing journal on Microsoft word and turn it in to be graded as part of a portfolio every so often? To me this question is the first question that should be asked when considering using a blog in your classroom. You need to make sure you as the teacher feel that some of the work (maybe even hassle) will be worth it. If you you don’t totally by into the purpose for using the blog how can you justify it to the critics or even more importantly, your students.

I believe the answer to this question is in the basics of teaching writing. Blogs are not something that are written with the purpose of just getting good grades from your teacher. These blogs will be read by your classmates, your teacher, and maybe other people that have nothing to do with your class. This gives you an audience (remember I talked about the basics of writing), this gives the writer a vested interest in his/her writing that they is on another plane then just writing for the teacher. This audience makes the writer aware of how the writing is being read and how they are being viewed. The voice pr personality starts to hold importance in the writers point of view. Kristen Kennedy explains this on Techlearning.com a few years ago during the early stages of using blogs in classrooms:

What makes Web logs unique is their emphasis on publication and their signature as a dynamic genre of Web writing. Forming the technical backbone of blogs are content management programs, such as PostNuke or UserLand’s Manila, that are built to be “personal publishing systems,” as UserLand president and COO John Robb puts it. No HTML is required, since these programs are designed to be as easy to use as a word processing application, but with additional collaboration and communication features. Manila, for example, can manage 500 individual student sites, discussion boards, mail bulletin functions, and digital portfolios all with site search and syndicated news stream capture capabilities.

Unlike most Web sites, which generally combine static and dynamic features, a blog is produced with an active writer in mind, one who creates in an online writing space designed to communicate an identity, a personality, and most importantly, a point of view.

This begins to answer the question of “why blogging?”. By providing a means to publish the writing of your students, they start to care about this writing in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. They are not just presenting a paper to a teacher but are presenting themselves to their peers and the outside world via the blog.

Now that we have started to consider the why question we need to start to investigate the how question. How do we as teachers implement the blog into our curriculum so that it supports the fundamentals and methods of writing to make our students not only become powerful writers but to meet the expectations of the outside world (i.e. standardized tests, employers, future teachers, etc.). Hopefully we can start to investigate this fully in my next post.  

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