Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

Blogs, or Web logs, are chronologically arranged online journals, a medium for personal publishing. They generally include personal commentaries and observations, with comments and links, and opportunities for asynchronous response. Blogs tend to communicate their writers’ personalities and points of view. And they are proliferating: Some say a new blog is built every second.

We already teach students writing in a variety of forms. We teach research and exposition. Where does blogging fit?

Blogs let students engage in a form of journalism. Their journals work best when they become sustained conversations - when students write and reflect about a particular topic or issue over time and when that writing inspires response from an audience. The conversation might incorporate the works of others, breaking news in the form of newsfeeds, and students linking to and responding to the external resources.

When it works well as an educational tool, blogging involves students in content, critical reading, and thoughtful, reflective writing.

David Warlick, educational technology consultant, author and director of the Landmark Project, sees blogs as strategies for encouraging writing. When blogs are effective, students write for an audience and receive authentic response.

Warlick notes that blog writing might occasionally warrant a more casual approach. Traditional writing assignments are “for teacher’s eyes only. We are teaching rules and syntax and students have to follow rules. Blogging is much more about communication and kids are all about communication.”

Warlick suggests that for some assignments, teachers might allow students to use instant-messaging-speak, especially when the audience is other students: “We have to respect kids for the incredible feat of inventing a new grammar.”

Other assignments would, of course, require students to use formal language: “It’s about the audience and the goals. It’s about the excitement of responses from the class and beyond.”

Beyond their personal reflections and experiences, students might create simulated blogs for a historical or fictional figure. Students can represent the ideas of the great philosophers or portray the characters in Julius Caesar. They might express particular points of view on a controversy over the course of the semester, inspiring comments and argument from classmates and beyond.

Warlick also sees blogging as a teaching tool. Teachers could use their own blogs to organize general class dialogue or small-group literature discussions. In Portland, Ore., Lewis Elementary School, at http://lewiselementary. org/, uses a blog to transmit information to its school community. Middle school teacher George Mayo publishes Brandon’s Online, at http://mrmayo.typepad.com/magazine/, to collect the blogs and podcasts of his sixth-grade students at Brandon Middle School in Virginia Beach, Va.

Closer to home, Thomas McHale, an English teacher at Hunterdon Central Regional (N.J.) High School, maintains three educational blogs.

In Open Classroom: Using Technology, Transparency, and Discussion to Transform Education, at http://tmchale.blogspot.com, McHale invites parents and fellow teachers to join a conversation that revolves around “weblogs, interdisciplinary teaching, writing, journalism, high school newspapers, and the culture of high school.”

Last year, as an experiment, McHale began a blog for his yearlong interdisciplinary American studies class, at http://central.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/americanstudies/. McHale’s journalism class, at http://central.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/mcjournalism, is blog-based and paperless. He links to his students’ individual writing blogs as well as the blogs of several writers’ groups.

For McHale, blogs have opened new possibilities. Blogs “engage students in the processes of reading and reflecting and they can improve writing.”

But he notes that “having a blog in itself doesn’t do it.” Blogs require audience and interaction: “You have to recruit people in.”

Over the last year, McHale has invited journalists, parents and others into the conversation. McHale feels that blogs can “expand the classroom beyond its traditional walls to involve parents, other teachers, other schools. The possibilities are great if teachers are willing to take the risk.”

For a linked list of Web resources visit: http://joycevalenza.com/podblogwiki.html.