Class Blogs

While reading Will Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I came across a reference to a blog post by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, authors of the book The Mislabeled Child. In their post Brain of the Blogger, they state that blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking. As I was reading both the book and the blog post, I began to think of the many ways I could have used blogs with my English classes. What a great way for my students to continue a class discussion on Native Son beyond the walls of the traditional classroom. If I had included something like this and encouraged my students to use it, they may not have created a Facebook page with the intent of sharing ideas before their literary response journals were due. Also, the more I think about the idea of using blogs with my students, the more I realize I could have cut down on the amount of paper crossing my desk (and saved a few trees). That doesn't mean that my grading load would have decreased, but instead of carrying home two or three tote bags full of student work to be assessed, I could have used an RSS feed to subscribe to their blogs and receive notification of their updates via Google Reader. I could read all of their posts, comment on those I chose to, and then assign a grade based on the quality of those posts. As a teacher I could still manage these blogs to a certain extent. I could still have due dates, require students to comment on their classmates' posts, and even give them specific topics for their posts. While reading Timothy Findley's The Wars with my 12IB class, I could have had the students discuss Findley's use of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water for each of the five books within the novel -- or consider the work as a whole. A blog would be a great way for a student to express his or her opinion on the author's writing style and require them to support it with examples from the text, plus it would allow their classmates to read and comment on the posts. Students could also link outside resources, possibly critical essays, to their posts.

I know that some of my former colleagues would comment on the digital divide and the fact that not all of our students had access to a computer at home. However, our students had access to the computers in the library and in my classroom. If computers are a concern, then a teacher needs to build computer lab time into the class schedule -- whether it is once a week or several times a month. Teachers can determine how often they want to require their students to post.

I trained my students to use my class website as a resource for class handouts, link to online resources, and access to the online gradebook. Some of them came to depend upon the site so much that when one of them began her college poetry class, she emailed me when she couldn't find my poetry materials on my page (I had turned off the link). I am confident I could have trained them to use blogs as more than just a social networking tool. If you are looking for a new way to engage your students, I recommend you try class blogs.