As I sit in Mr. Biche’s science classroom, staring out at Mt. Washington, I begin to think about blogging versus just commenting. As I look around I am immersed in vocabulary such as ISSO7, blogging, google reader and many other technological words. Although I have a class blog myself, I feel my students are not really blogging yet. My blog tends to be more of myself writing the assignment or topic I would like them to talk about and then my students writing their comments down. My students I feel see it more as another version of their writing journal in which they write paragraphs or essays in response to the questions I leave for them. In talking with Mr. Biche and reading his blog, I am not alone in this feeling here on our team. So, how do I get the students blogging and not just commenting?
Well, for starters Rick and I decided to create learner blogs for our students. We created four blogs and assigned about eighteen students to a blog. Then we sat down and made groups of five to assign students from various blogs who would be in charge of commenting on each other’s blogs in their group. After all this work, I still have no idea how to make the blog grow and become what Rick and I are hoping it to be: a place where students are engaged in conversations about topics having to do with their lessons and interdisciplinary units on the team.
Konrad Glogowski has a blog called Proximal Development and in it he talks about Growing a Blog. He states that
“In education, however, the product – the grade, the final draft, the test mark – still often takes precedence over the process of learning – the sense of personal journey without which the final destination is meaningless. What is even worse is that many of our students are very comfortable with that idea. To them, school is often about “playing the game.”
How do we get students to stop playing the game and begin conversing with each other through blogging? I feel that in order to truly blog the students will need to open their minds, be willing to put in the extra effort, and write meaningful posts that will intrigue and illicit conversation. Being eighth graders, this is a hard task to accomplish.
