Setting up a classroom blog site - putting theory into practice

Last week I set up a classroom blog for a Year 7 & 8 class at Villa Maria. This was an incredibly valuable process in terms of gaining a better understanding of the practicalities involved in the process. It is one thing to create a person blog that you update and manage in your own time. A blog that you have complete control and responsibility over. It is a very different thing to create a classroom blog. A blog that will be used by students, and potentially viewed by parents.

So how did I go about this process and what did I learn along the way that would be valuable lessons to share?

- It was important to ensure that the creation of a blog was a collective process between me and the students. If students are involved in the creation stage, then they ultimately take a greater degree of ownership for it and are more likely to maintain it in a responsible manner. I guess the pride they feel in having created it means that they have a vested interest in ensuring that it continues to be used (and not abused) by people.

- When setting up the blog I worked with a small group of students who were selected by the teacher. I had two year 7s and two year 8s. I don’t think I would set up the blog with any more than 4 students as it would get too complicated in terms of each person sharing their opinions on layout/design etc. The other good thing about blogger is that you can always go back and change the design/layout at a later stage if you want to.



- Once the students had set up the blog I needed to send out an e-mail to each student inviting them to join the blog. This was more problematic than I had envisaged as some e-mails got ‘lost’ in cyberspace and it took a while to add in each student’s e-mail address. It also got me thinking how you would do this in a classroom where students didn’t have their own e-mail accounts. I spoke with a friend who uses blogs in her classroom and she explained that there is a way that you can ‘add’ people to your g-mail account giving them a separate log-in but keeping a single e-mail address. This is something I will have to explore further to see how teachers navigate this obstacle.

- After morning tea the whole class came to the computer room so that I could teach a lesson on blogging. I decided that before I got them on their blog I wanted to cover some important aspects of blogging with them (see attached powerpoint). These included:
• What do we know about blogs?
• How do we want to use our blog?
• Internet Safety and Responsible Behaviour Guidelines
• Writing a blog post
• Commenting on a blog post

- Approaching the setting up of a blog in this way allowed a number of discussions to take place about what kind of blog they wanted, the kinds of things they wanted on it, and issues of security and accessibility. It was decided that this blog will initially be visible only to the students and teacher in the class. They decided that they will use the blog for a few weeks and assess how things are going. Is it being used? Is it being used appropriately? Is it easy to update (or are we spending a lot of class time doing it)? It is adding value to our learning (inside and outside of the class). At the end of this time they will then ask themselves some new questions:
• Would we like to allow our families/friends access to this blog?
• Would we like to add our blog to the school intranet so that other classes can view it?
• Is a blog site something that the other intermediate classes could benefit from too? Would we like to help them set up blog sites for their classes?


- Part of the intro to blogging involved students exploring other blog sites (especially ones created by school students).



- It was important to establish ground rules in terms of the blog. The most important ground rule related to ‘appropriateness’ of posts. To emphasise this point I modelled examples of different things that could be included on the blog and we discussed whether we thought these things were appropriate. Ultimately we made the distinction between the things we would share on a social networking site like Facebook and those that we wanted on this blog which was set up to share the work of students in the class (and achievements and interests outside of class - that are linked to learning)

- Language: We made the decision that this is a formal blog site and therefore students need to use correct spelling and grammar when posting.

- Labels: Over the next week students are going to develop a list of labels to use in their blog postings. This will help with the categorizing of posts on the site and for searching.

Why I Blog with Kids

I have had a number of people asking about my project over the past few weeks. My mother over the dinner table, colleagues at my part-time job, students on my course, my grandad visiting town for the day. A response that I have been confronted with after announcing my topic has been, 'what's the point?', 'where is the learning in this'. This question has been thrown at me before I have had a chance to fully explain what blogging is, and to justify my project and the exciting possibilities technologies like this offer us as teachers. But, all the same, it's a common gut reaction....and this has me thinking about why people react in this way, and what we can do to counter these reactions.

Tackling the 'why' is beyond the scope of any single project. This issue is linked to broader fears within society about technology, changing forms of literacy, a fear of losing the 'fundamentals' of education to the 'whim' of passing technologies. I could go on but I won't.

However, what I do think is valuable (well crucial really as classroom teachers using this technology) is to know the reasons why we have chosen to use blogs, and to have tangile learning outcomes and skills that we can describe to parents.

I came across the following blog which I thought was useful in terms of addressing this issue: 'Why I Blog with Kids'



http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2006/03/why_i_blog_with.html

This blog provides a very simple but powerful outline of the benefits of using blogs in the classroom. I found this blog particularly meaningful because it wasn't written by an academic or education specialist, but by a classroom teacher. This is one classroom teacher's response to 'why do you get the students to blog?'. I hope that you too find it useful in your teaching.

what are students thinking.......

I found this on a blogsite (thethinkingstick.com). It was a quote that was taken from David Warlick). It helped me in relation to my developing ideas on the way students interact with technology, and my arguments for why technology needs to be de-demonised.



"If you have children, who spend a good deal of their time IMing, playing video games, blogging, googling, or other negotiations with technology, put yourselves in their shoes and ask yourself this question. Is it the computer, the game controller, the mobile phone, or PDA that I'm thinking about? or is it the information, the conversation, the negotiation that I'm thinking about. I say it's the conversations, the information. Information is what its all about."


I think that if we approach interactions with technology from this angle, with a focus on the processes that students go though, then not only will it let us see the usage of these technologies in new and more positive ways, but it will also assist us as teachers in our understandings of the skills and scaffolds that we need to be providing our students when we use these technologies in the classroom.

What will collaborative technologies mean when our students enter the world of tertiary education?

Although my project is looking at the use of blogs in primary classrooms I keep coming back to the question of what this means for students when they enter tertiary education with its strong reliance on transmission style learning (a constant source of debate between me and my profs).....and then I came across this article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-tapscott/the-impending-demise-of-t_b_213702.html

The full article can be found on The Edge site (scroll down a bit on the homepage and you will find it)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/tapscott09/tapscott09_index.html

Blogs, Podcasts and Virtual Classrooms

I found this an interesting article in terms of the kinds of things that classroom teachers are doing in the US in terms of using blogs. It was interesting to see the arising conflict between collaborative learning and testing......

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/technology/techspecial3/03ethan.html?scp=1&sq=blogs%20and%20classrooms&st=cse

"If interactivity becomes the fundamental basis of the educational process, how do we judge merit?" asked Robbie McClintock, a learning technologies expert at Teachers College of Columbia University.

The push by some teachers for greater interactivity in the classroom also goes against the current emphasis on testing. Testing requires a known body of material, but interactive learning often involves students' seeking out topics on their own.


Fortunately we don't have the same pressure in NZ primary schools in terms of testing and therefore have greater freedom to use these kinds of collaborative technologies. However, I think it is important to think through the possible concerns you may get from parents about the use of these technologies. It is important to involve parents in the process, and to have a strong set of beliefs and justifications for why you are using these technologies and new forms of literacy in your classroom.