Techlearning blog

2008 is fast approaching and the hope of a new semester is within reach for teachers and scholars alike. With this new hope, many teachers will find it the perfect opportunity to begin incorporating a new approach or a new idea into their practices. One of these will surely be blogging and I hope these ideas help get you started!

Critical to this process is the understanding that blogging is about reading and critical thinking not writing. Don’t get me wrong. The end product of blogging is communication; however, the real growth comes from the entire process and it starts with deep, critical reading:

learning to read critically helps you to write well. It leads you to a fuller understanding of the subject enabling you to go beyond the obvious, to avoid superficiality and oversimplification. Reading critically helps you anticipate what readers will expect and what questions they may have in mind as they read your writing (Axelrod, Cooper, and Warriner, p. 1)

In other words, scholars need to read blogs! I cannot overstate this fact enough. If you really want blogging to be transformative and you want it to sustain itself as a powerful piece of the classroom environment, it starts with seeing the philosophy of this genre as authentic literacy: critical reading, connecting and synthesizing ideas, communicating publicly, creating, contributing, community linking and building, and moving cyclically.

Without this step, scholars are more likely to see it merely as an online equivalent to a journal (an expensive notebook) or simply another assignment using word processing. Teachers are more likely to hear scholars say “how long”, “what should I write”, and “what do I do now” if this portion is missing. However, when the environment is established using the aforementioned philosophy, scholars will begin shifting their thinking away from blogging as an assignment towards authentic literacy.

As the scholars engage in critical reading of blogs (and other texts for that matter), they are ready to begin discussing not only what the text says but how and why it says what is says. These discussions and debates, oral and written, with the ideas from the texts and the opinions of others reading the text are at the heart of argumentative literacy and create an excellent transition into blogging.

At this point, two critical decisions are needed to be made: 1. how to assign blog posts 2. open or walled access to blogs.

First, assigning blog posts needs to be as open as possible free from discussion starters and prompts as possible. If the scholars are critically reading and engaging in scholarly discourse frequently, there is plenty these students will have to write about on their blogs. Thus, the key is working with scholars on developing their writing list and forming guidelines for how often to post to their blog.

Second, the open or walled garden approach is based largely upon your school system. However, if the decision rests with the teacher, the open approach is ideal. As Postman (1997) states,

It is only be subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions… half-formed convictions based upon random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of opinion, gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others (p. 171).

Creating an environment where argumentative literacy using transformative blogging as a key part of 21st Century classroom is challenging but there are many educators that have formulated amazing ideas on how to make it happen and how to sustained it in the classroom However, there are those that quickly set one up and toss students out to blog — assigning blogging not teaching blogging.

The question is which one are you? which one will you be?

Overview of Steps

1. Setup a class feed reader — I suggest Google Reader but this is merely a choice
2. Add a mixture of blogs into Google Reader: professional, academic, school (all grade levels including collegiate), personal, etc.
3. As part of the class environment, have your reader open each day and point out new blog articles and discuss pieces to read. Also, the discussion of RSS and blog from a structural perspective are easier to discuss.
4. Engage in blog Read Alouds in class
5. As a class, cultivate rich student discussion over these articles and formulate class or small group responses that are submitted as comments to the blogs.
6. Have scholars maintain a list of articles they would write if blogging. This list could be either individual, group, or class.
7. Establish blogs and begin blogging.
NOTE: This approach is not based upon the use of a blog as a discussion board nor is it based upon students responding to a prompt. These are student driven blogs where they are determining what to write based upon their readings.

References

Axelrod, R.B., Cooper, C.R., & Warriner, A.M. (2001). Reading Critically, writing well. Boston: Bedford St. Martins.

Postman, N. (1997). The end of education. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Schmoker, M. (2006). Results now: How we can achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching and learning. Alexandria, Virgina: ASCD.