The Next Star, Blogging III

Looking back at the Journey

Blogging has been a great way of communicating with my students and their parents. By using blogs my students became better informed of their assignments and the events taking place at school; their parents became better informed of classroom happenings.  Furthermore, I have truly enjoyed getting to know my students on a personal level (Zawilinski, 2009).  By reading and commenting on their posts I learnt a great deal about what their likes and dislikes, what they like to do for fun, and even their future hopes and dreams.  I know that I would have learnt the same information if I didn’t use the blog; however, I am not sure if I would have learnt this much in only two weeks.  I can’t wait to try using our classroom blog in other ways.  Blogging is one of my favourite tools so far and I can’t wait to learn more ways to effectively implement it into my everyday teaching.  

Uploading Video Lessons

 Blogging in my classroom today

Today blogging has taken on a much different look in my classroom.  It is much more focused and learning centered.  Based on my readings from Richardson, Berger & Trexler and McGrail & Davis classroom blogs need to positively impact student collaboration and communication.  McGrail & Davis suggest that classroom blogs focus more on the communication process rather than the simple mechanics such as spelling and grammar.  Those things are still important but the main idea behind a blog is to get a message across to others (McGrail & Davis, 2010). Students still need to learn how to spell and how to use proper grammar; however, the main idea behind blogs is to get student engagement up –especially to those students who might be reluctant learners.  My experiences using blogs seemed to match those observed by McGrail & Davis. My students became more motivated to write; they expressed their opinion on a variety of topics, used a lot of humor and were extremely playful (McGrail & Davis, 2010).      

Recently I started adding more curricular based discussion on our blogs and encouraging discussion from my students.  We took volunteers from the class that would like to become domain masters for each subject area.  It was those students responsibility to create video lessons on topics covered in class and post their lessons on our blog for others to watch and comment on.  This was a great hit with all the students and parents.  Students created so many lessons on a variety of topics.  Soon everyone was on board and began creating and posting lessons or asking for lessons to be made.  In short, my students wanted to learn.  This was the highest level of intrinsic motivation that I have ever seen from students (Richardson, 2010).  The attitude changed, the level of understanding deepened, the type and amount of connections increased and they became better learners (McGrail & Davis, 2010). 

Areas of Frustration 

There were two areas of frustration for me when I created my classroom blog: my district frowns on public blogs sites and strongly encourages teachers to use made and operated sites.  This is a great idea since students was extremely safe from any outside contact, in fact none can be made at all.  What this means is that parents need to use their children’s credential to log in from home and that other students in the school or grade level will not have access to my classroom.  According to Richardson, blogs are meant to be shared with others. While I might not want the entire world to see that my students are typing to one another, I think it would be okay for their parents and other students to see and comment on a discussion.

The other main frustration I had with setting up my blog was the amount of time it took to get it just right.  I had to invite all my students one at a time and then grant them permissions for each different section of the virtual classroom.  Again, I love how secure my virtual classroom is but there has got to be a better way of providing a high level of security while still being time effective.  I know a lot of teachers that do not use blogs in their classrooms because of the time it takes just to get one up and running.  It took me approximately 6 hours to get my blog setup with all the right security settings and another 2 to invite all my students and give permissions.  This doesn’t even take into account the time we spent in class learning how to use the tool. 

I don’t want to sound like a pessimist; in fact, I love my classroom blog and will use it for the rest of the year and for the years to come.  All I am trying to say is that if we want more teachers to buy in we must make these tools more manageable and time efficient.  Teachers are extremely busy people so for them to change what they are doing (and what is working) the new thing must be better for them, their students, and their schedules.

References 

Berger, P., & Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing Web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world / Pam Berger and Sally Trexler ; foreword by Joyce Valenza. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Libraries Unlimited, c2010. 

McGrail, E., & Davis, A. (2011). The Influence of Classroom Blogging on Elementary Student Writing. Journal Of Research In Childhood Education, 25(4), 415-437.

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms / Will Richardson. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Corwin Press, c2010.

Zawilinski, L. (2009). HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking. Reading Teacher, 62(8), 650-661.