Why Blog with Students?

This is a question often asked by teachers when blogging with students is suggested. I asked it myself many years ago when the topic was first brought up to me in an education technology class I had to take to clear my teaching credential. I think what I actually thought was more like, “why on earth would I want to do that?” This was in 2005 or 2006. Now, I blog with students, but how did this change happen? What understanding did I come to that helped this make sense to me? Two things; how it helps students by giving them audience and feedback, and how to keep enough control so that it was a safe environment.

Audience and Feedback

Blogging gives students an audience that you just can’t get in a classroom writing situation. At most in the classroom, they will have their fellow students as an audience. Most of the time, they will only have you, their teacher, as an audience for their writing. Even if you expand their audience through systems like pen pals or some other exchange system, it can’t compare with the ease and breadth of the audience available with blogging.

One is the Loneliest Number

Why is this important? Students are more motivated to write, and create better writing when they have an audience to write to. Try to imagine the song, "One is the Loneliest Number". That's what students feel like when they do writing assignments that no one reads. Pretty sad, no? Obviously some writers (diarist) have found motivation in this situation, but that type of intrinsic motivation for writing is not the norm.

Two is nice

The next level of audience is where you have a teacher reviewing, and responding to student writing. It looks better, but it's still a rather limited audience.

Now, we're talking

Let's look at what we can do when you have students share and publish writing with their class, like writer's workshop programs or a closed class blog that is not viewable by the public. A much larger audience for students  which will give them greater motivation. This is where it starts to get interesting...Now the writing is starting to get social. For humans, being the social creatures we are, learning is a social transaction. So in this scenario, students have an audience, they are getting feedback, and they are having conversations. This is motivating, this is meaningful. This is learning!

Don't be afraid to go public!

When you make blogs public, and allow for comments from outsiders you expand that audience even further, and have the opportunity for really rich exchanges. This is also the point when you run the risk of less pleasant things occurring on the blog. When I first heard of student blogging, this was the concern I had. I was familiar with blogs, and had even done some blogging myself at that point. I could not picture having students on BlogSpot (now Blogger), where one press of the "Next Blog" button could lead them to the online diary of a New York City call girl (hey it happened to me, it could happen to them). Having been on many online forums going back to the days of dial-up BBS, I was picturing some "trolls" showing up in the comments spreading profanity, and hatred. I also knew my students were not all angels, what if they posted something naughty in a moment of pre-adolescent puckishness? How to make it safe and public? First, most blogging platforms, and all the platforms available for blogging in education have various forms of comment moderation available. This will allow you to control what appears. If you have students keep their own blogs, you can still have admin and moderation control. Once I figured that out, I was ready to go. I hope you will be too. I will be covering more about how to manage this and set up blogs for your classroom in my next article. Until then, I hope this gives you food for thought.

Note: This article was authored by Alice Mercer under contract with the California Technology Assistance Project.