Nuts and Bolts #3 - Blogging in the Classroom

Along with wikis and RSS, blogs form a central part of redefining the classroom's relationship to information. While wikis are often used to produce communal and collaborative information as a group, and RSS is used to access the latest information on almost any topic you can imagine, blogs are often used in a classroom as a space where information is created by individuals.

There are commonly three different types of blogs that are used in classrooms:

1.) Comment blog - This type of blog usually features posts that are written by the classroom teacher who then asks the students for their thoughts and comments about an issue.

2.) Scribe Post - This type of blog is a communal effort where often one student (or a small group of students) each take a turn recapping what happened during a specific subject or lesson each day. Over time this develops into a perfect resource that can be used for review or as the textbook for the course. It is a valuable way to use a blog for a content heavy course.

3.) Mother blog and kids - This is what I call a central blog, usually developed by the teacher, which has links to all of the individual blogs kept by the students. The student blogs in turn may be used as scribe blogs, as learning logs, as reflective spaces, as research dumping grounds, etc. There are many different ways that individual students may use blogs.

In my classroom, I use a mother blog approach. The mother blog for my classroom is here and the links to all of the kids in my class (well, last year's class anyway) are there as well. Some of my contacts and classroom resources are also linked off of here. I use this blog as a portal. I post general information about classroom happenings, remind kids about things we are doing in class, and sometimes ask kids for their comments and concerns on issues. As we do not use a learning management system (LMS) such as Moodle, we have a lot of different pieces that we need to coordinate; this is one of the reasons that I put all of the links on this blog, so that the kids do not need to remember all of the URLs we use; they know that important links are on my blog.

Much more important than my blog are the blogs written by the kids. We use Learnerblogs and love them. Based on Wordpress, they are free, easy to use, very customizable, and James Farmer is awesome if you have any troubles, he is always willing to help.

In my classroom, the students are expected to write at least two posts each week that are related to what we are doing in class. Sometimes I give them a direct subject or topic they need to write about, other times I will tell them that they need to write about a certain project we are doing in class, but give them a lot of freedom over what they choose to write. Other times I will leave it much more wide open and just ask them to write about school to see where their questions and concerns are.

I have four computers in my classroom and the kids in my class can sign up to use them during our daily silent reading time. They can write their own posts, they can read others and leave them comments. I also usually dedicate one 80 minute period a week to blogging where again they are also free to read the blogs of others and leave them comments. I still find though that the majority of their writing is done at home after hours.

As I want kids to learn to blog safely, we have a very simple set of guidelines for blogging which basically say keep yourself safe, do not give out personal information in what you write, and know that what you write will have an audience and will be read by others; write appropriately.

I choose to mark what my kids write. There has been much debate over whether it is appropriate to mark this form of writing; I believe it is. I usually give out 10 marks each week for their blogging. I mark these posts based on the writing itself (style, grammar, spelling), but worth as much weight are things specific to writing online such as formatting (small paragraphs, sub-titles, colours, fonts), use of appropriate graphics, and links provided to outside information sources people can go to learn more about the topic.

As a teacher, I subscribe, using RSS to all of the blogs of the kids in my class, allowing me to see everything they have written. This makes it easy for me to keep up with their work and allows me to head off any potential problems. I make it a regular habit to comment of their blogs and model giving valuable, helpful comments.

Blogging is a central prt of life in my classroom and in the relationships and voices that devlop over the year.

technorati tags:blog, classroom, wordpress, learnerblogs, james, farmer

Comments

[diane]

Thank you for sharing such detailed information on your classroom blogging. I'm hoping to incorporate this type of activity in our high school Current Events class, and, although I have a general idea of how it might work, your remarks on assignments, grading, etc. will be very helpful.

As a fairly new (since late June) blogger myself, I think I'll be able to discuss with my students both the challenges and the rewards of blogging.

[marcopolo47]

You say you choose to mark what your kids write. If so, do you tell them or announce those marks each week? If so, how? I think this is a good idea, and I'd like to try it. I also marked my students blogs last year, but I only did it at the end of the semester for final grades. It might have been better if students could see their marks immediately: it would provide immediate feedback and might stimulate them to write better.

[Clarence Fisher]

As the post says, the kids have all of the criteria how the blog piece are going to be marked in advance. When I mark them, I simply go through their stuff and then write their mark (out of 10 each week) on a sticky note and give it to each student with a comment or two as well.

[Marco Polo]

Thanks. Much appreciated. I like the idea of quick feedback. A friend who uses a CALL system told me his students, tho they are not highly motivated, enjoyed being able to get their quiz or assignment scores immediately (it's built into the software, which is not cheap). That's something I haven't done really with my classes.