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Blog Benefits
By audhill | January 12, 2008
Okay… so everyone always talks about how children really need us to teach them about social computing. No they don’t. They do all the social computing they could ever need. But, they do need us to show them uses they aren’t thinking about. That in mind, my question to myself is … am I doing that with these blogs?
What are they getting? What are they missing? What do I want to do differently next year… next week?
Important positives:
1) Minimum requirements of at least one 300 word blog entry each week = having to think up new topics and be creative on demand. As William Faulkner said “I write only when I’m inspired. Fortunately I’m inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.”
2) Clean up patrol: spell check, self edit, paragraphing helps to encourage the idea (new for many of them) that they are their first editors.
3) Assigned writing as well as personal choice: Insures writing for a variety of purposes and topics.
4) Team blogs: creates a sense of a group effort to create good work.
5) Public nature: They write for each other. They want to be read and commented on. Suddenly, writing is a social activity that helps define them to themselves and each other.
Areas to work on:
1) Technology tools: they aren’t all hyperlinking, using html or including images. They aren’t yet making really creative use of interactivity. If I could do it over again, I’d use a software that allowed them to use more tech tools. Guest and junior authors in typepad have much less access to utilities. I’d go to WordPressMU probably.
2) Ability to help them understand how to improve writing is not as easy to do as it would be in a wiki or on paper. I leave comments that they have to interpret. Generally, they probably don’t.
3) Design issues: They don’t really know how to use the visual tools to make their blogs attractive places for readers.
4) Blog Education: Blogging has it’s own requirements to build audience. Professional bloggers use strategies to get their audiences. I might be able to work some of this into future iterations, but not for this year (of course, I have a lot to learn in this regard.. and I would be having them do things I’m not really doing myself.. but anyway…)
Not Working At ALL:
1) No outside commentary or relationships with other classes and students. I could get this going, but there’s so much to work on now, that I don’t want to complicate things yet.
2) No podcasts or videocasting yet. (I want to do this, but the question remains always for me … Am I working their literacy skills while they work the technology. If I’m not.. then I can’t put the time into it (no matter what the tech evangelists say)
For this year, I am happy that they blog once a week, that they pick 3 out of 4 of their topics a month, that they write on a variety of topics, for a variety of purposes, that they spell check, paragraph, self edit, that they look at the blogs every day and write comments and wait for comments. I am happy that they are interested in the Weekly Wow (although I am myself tentative about highlighting some blogs over other blogs). I hope to podcast or video blog before the end of the year with them (we’ll see). I am glad that we are begun.
Next blog entry I think I will write about what blogging costs in terms of time in the classroom and time for the teacher, because it makes no sense to have a program that steals life from the teacher and erodes other curriculum down to a nub.