Reflections on Blogging Exchange

Well, the lab is empty, we’re all on Winter Break, and I am in the midst of processing my thoughts about the collaborative blogging we did with Mrs. Hill’s classes in DuBois, PA. I want to thank her publicly again for her willingness to participate with us.

I would do this again with some caveats. Remember that I teach technology electives, not a content class. I center my units around the subject matter and standards the children study in their other classes while I’m (hopefully) meeting the technology standards. I find I don’t have time to do extensive reading or writing activities but I try to include as much language arts, math, history, and science as I can within the context of technology units. I see about 170 students per day and I get new classes every 9 weeks. It was my first experience with blogging. By the way, we are not allowed to go to any blogs or wikis other than Think.com, which you my recall me mentioning in prior posts. I would really appreciate any suggestions from more experienced teachers who have used blogging in their classrooms.

I really enjoyed having my kids blog regularly and thought it was a valuable experiment. (We required 2 posts and 3 comments per week. We provided 35 prompts and didn’t allow much free-writing due to time limitations and the age of our students–11 to 14.)

I feel I got to know my kids a little better and they got to know the DuBois kids a little. I really appreciated the quality of Mrs. Hill’s kids’ comments that I saw; they were cogent, pertinent and thoughtful most of the time. The kids found out that they were very much alike despite the fact that they were far apart geographically. Obviously this was one of my goals. Now if only I can arrange this with an international school!

The unit as structured was way too hard for me to stay on top of and score, considering that all our other projects continued as usual and I was trying out some brand new multimedia, 2.0 types of activities. I need to make the blogging project a separate activity or something; not add it to what I’m already reading, responding to, and grading. I wanted it to go on in the background, which it did, but it was lower priority than it could have been. I never really had time to use the rubric we designed; I was just happy to be able to get online, tally their posts, and move on. (The rubric was really just a nod to and documentation for the PowersThatBe to justify the educational value of blogging). I rarely gave more than a cursory glance at the comments my students wrote to the DuBois kids. I’m embarrassed about that. There just wasn’t time or energy. I did let my kids know I had read their posts even if I couldn’t comment on them individually. Next time perhaps I could limit this project to just one grade level, i.e. just 2 classes or 50 students. Maybe that would make it manageable.

I found that when I sent the kids get online to blog many of them just used that as an excuse to sticky, email, browse, and surf the web or their regular Think.com personal spaces. They often weren’t in the project space and/or they weren’t writing or commenting thoughtfully. If I circulated every single minute through the class and corrected them, they returned to the project space, but it was a constant issue with many of my students. That disappointed me but I should have anticipated it; they have always liked to get on Think just to mess around no matter how much “formal” educational value it can have. I feel our class time is too short to allow that kind of waste. I need to sort how I would address that next time.

Most of the kids enjoyed the chance to express themselves and they seemed to like the prompts. Some of them still wrote about whatever they wanted and didn’t do the assigned writing; I have mixed feelings about that — at least they were writing! However, it made it difficult to give them a passing grade, since they didn’t follow directions.

I was quite disappointed that some of my kids used inappropriate language with some DuBois kids; that came out of nowhere, since we do talk about online behavior pretty extensively. I guess there are always a few who push the limits. It usually is not my “innocent” little 6th Graders, however. As always, those students lost their Think.com privileges, which is quite a blow for them socially and it means that when we do fun activities in Think.com they have to use something boring like Word or PowerPoint to complete the assignment.

I haven’t received my partner-teacher’s reflections on the unit. I’m eager to read them so I can know how to improve the activity.

By the way, the lab above reminds me how mine will look if I ever get the remodel my principal and I designed last winter. He’s still promising but I don’t know what to believe anymore. Sigh.