I was asked to moderate the #TXEduChat for this Sunday, and I couldn’t resist.  

And since it’s about blogging, I thought I should get back on my blogging horse and write something.

My experience with blogging started about five years ago.  I had students make online/blog-based “dialogue journals.”

The idea of a dialogue journal comes from Nancie Atwell.  The original assignment, if you’re not familiar, is a kind of letter-to-the-teacher about what the student is reading.  Students are expected to explain what they’re reading (summarize), explain what parts of the book they enjoyed and didn’t enjoy (evaluate), and apply strategies (predict, connect, infer, question).  Except for the summarizing section, students are expected to make specific reference to the text for these things.

I’ve used these almost every year that I’ve been teaching middle school, and when they’re working well, they’re a good lens into the student’s understanding and development as a reader, and to a lesser extent, as a writer.

Five years ago, we were offered the opportunity to use our new Apple wiki servers for “blogging.”  I don’t completely understand how it was deployed, but I know that students were able to publish in a closed environment, where only students from our class were able to see what they were writing.  That was a condition of their publication at the time.  Parents were only able to see blogs if they had their child log in first.

That first year included some challenges.  For example, I found out that if 20 students are trying to update a wiki page at the same time, they will delete each other’s posts.  They either need separate pages or a “blog” in the strict sense, with separate posts that are included all on the same page in chronological order.  I also found out that the kids wanted to know what their peers were reading and writing, and that they would comment on each other’s pages – appropriately – if I moderated comments and encouraged them to do so.

That first group was amazing, and we ended the year with some really positive examples of student writing about books.  We experimented with other uses, but nothing seemed to work as well that year.  I even had one student (who happened to be a girl) edit the HTML version of her blog so that she could format her pictures correctly.  She even asked if she could add music to her blog.  I told her no, of course, since teachers are supposed to be terrified of popular music, right?  (That’s a joke – I was more worried about bandwidth and setting off security red flags than bad words.  But bad words are easier to explain, aren’t they?)

I went a little nuts with blogs the following year, asking students to do collaborative writing, some kind of writing reflection, dialogue journals, short stories, poetry, and all sorts of things on their blogs.  It was a little too much, and the group that I had seemed less interested in technology in general.  I think that’s a factor sometimes.  Sometimes we teach the same thing the same way to different kids and get completely different responses, don’t we?

Anyway, I’ve experimented now with a few different platforms and tasks, and I’d have to say that blogging is a great tool for writing instruction.  But it’s not a silver bullet.  If kids struggle to write and don’t want to share, blogging is anathema.  A writing notebook is a safe place to “play” that is much more private, and is a better strategy for a struggling writer.  Unless you can get the struggling writer to feel safe on the blog.

Anyway, these are my initial thoughts on blogging as an instructional strategy.  It’s a great way to have kids writing in public, so to speak.  And that alone is worth the struggles with tech and the concerns about privacy.

So blog on.