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

David Perry of the University of Albany writes in Blogs for Learning- 

Although in the past few years there has been a marked growth in the number of higher education classrooms that utilize an on-line writing component, adapting the teaching of writing to digital spaces has met with resistance on the part of both students and professors. While there are many hurdles to address in navigating technological changes in writing practices, I would like to suggest that part of the problem has been a lack of understanding about the ways that information is disseminated and archived in these spaces. We need to begin by framing the approach in a new way to contextualize writing better, and, more importantly, to make classroom blogging (and even more broadly writing in digital spaces) more productive for the students and professors. In particular, I want to show how the technology of RSS is crucial both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint to any digital writing, but especially to any blogging classroom.

If you were to tell high school teachers that you had a way to get their students to aggressively research for a paper and enjoy doing it they would be very interested and a little excited. Tell them that this same method would teach or improve those students ability to cite that research and they might be a little skeptical. Add the fact that the students will really enjoy it and those teachers will probably walk away thinking you have some crazy new untested theory and won’t sit by you in the teachers lounge anymore, but that is exactly what blogging while using a RSS reader can accomplish.

Today’s high school students are digital natives that naturally have the ability to multi-task using technology in ways that  their teachers have a hard time catching up with. If we bring these abilities to the classroom for use in positive way there should be no reason that the academic abilities of the student won’t increase while achieving the standards set forth by the curriculum. By using RSS in tandem with blogs we allow these students to use their digital culture to meet our academic expectations. In the process they are exposed to many different points of view, journalistic and literary genre, and writing role models. When used properly the RSS will give students a base knowledge of all aspects of a project and in depth knowledge of specific focused areas. they are then able to process this information and create informed pieces of writing for an audience using blogs. This combination when presented the right way can accomplish a conceptualization of material while also improving writing skills.

Many people in the education field feel as though this type of project is to clumsy or awkward to be used in a classroom where teachers are expected to teach students material to prepare them for standardized tests. i say this could not be farther from the truth. Like any other  assignment the success and efficiency of it will depend on the preparation, organization, management, and follow through of the educator. The difference being that once this system is set up for a given classroom then the transition between different assignments and writing topics will go much easier then they would in a traditional class where the teacher starts over with each assignment. Classroom time will not be wasted going over bulky instructions and unnecessary time used for researching in the traditional ways. The subject will be given, the type of writing clarified, and prompts for searches in the aggregater given. the students will spend half the time researching and have much more time writing leading to more polished results and a more invested student.

Toward the end of of his article Mr. Parry writes:

Finally, as a related concern, utilizing RSS on the professor’s end can help you to keep a handle on all of your students’ postings and comments. Having a robust RSS reader enables all of the student posts to be delivered to your reader, instead of requiring that you visit each individual blog. This makes it much easier to asses student work, and, perhaps more importantly, much easier to comment on and provide feedback about students’ blogs.

What better argument then to say it will make the teachers job easier while also helping improve students writing?    

Blogs for Learning
The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom
By David Perry