Beta Blogging

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Even though student blogging is still in its infancy at I.S. 339, the improvement in the students' thinking and writing is apparent already. Sure, some students are taking longer to get into it than others, but the progression for many in focus, elaboration and organization from the first few posts to the sixth, seventh, eighth, etc is obvious.

It's also good to see students taking ownership of their blogs by including widgets with personalized avatars, or designing their own mastheads for the blog title. We can also witness the pride that some place in their presentation, with careful consideration of pictures or color.

Blogging also highlights students' needs, such as re-training on the importance of proper referencing to avoid plagiarism, or including text details for elaboration.

We can also sense students' thirst for recognition, as they acknowledge recent comments, or lack of comments. Hopefully, we can start to transform some of these posts into ongoing conversations.

Google Reader is, of course, so great for monitoring the students' work. You can see some of the students' blog posts in the Shared Items on the sidebar of this blog.

Blogs for Reading Reflection

The past two weeks at C.I.S. 339 (Bronx, New York) have emphasized both the power and the potential problems of classroom blogging. There has definitely been a ground swell of online writing, and increased engagement, from students in grade 8 as they have launched their blogs. Not only that, but teachers have also posted, and their writing has been entertaining and inspiring.

The problems that I alluded to are not so much problems with blogging itself, but problems highlighted by blogging, which is actually a good thing.

Using Google Reader, teachers are able to identify:

• students who are not posting
• inappropriate posts
• plagiarism
• lapses in protocols for ensuring personal internet security
  

However, these few problems have been completely overshadowed by the enthusiasm with which students and teachers are now embracing this medium. Blogging has given students an authentic purpose and audience.

Using our own version of the characteristics of effective writing (FOCUS, ORGANIZATION, ELABORATION, VOICE/VOCABULARY and CONVENTIONS), teachers can start to suggest areas for improvement via the comments in students' blogs.

We have developed a spreadsheet as a blog tracker to enable many teachers across the school to share in the students' posts, and the principal has started celebrating good posts in the school wiki.

I would love to see the day when a student starts a blog in grade 6 and maintains this through to the end of grade 8. Imagine the power of this kind of tracking of student growth and teacher feedback!