I’m having a honest discussion with myself that a few years ago I never thought would have been possible.
I’m wondering about running my classroom without individual blogs for each students.
For me, and for the way I teach, this is a big deal.
In 2005, I started blogging with the kids in my class. I had started my own writing online earlier this same year, wanting to experiment with this new idea before I tried it out with the kids in my classroom. I wanted to see if there was any educational merit to it. I quickly found a voice and a home online and was motivated to keep writing. I connected with teachers around the world. I soon found myself talking to teachers in South America, England and Southeast Asia. There were relatively few of us online but people like Susan Sedro, Darren Kuropatwa, Will Richardson, Bud Hunt and Dean Shareski were some of my earliest connections.
When that new school year started, I knew I had to put my kids online. Cnet and the New York Times picked up the trend of blogs making inroads into classrooms. Articles were written, my kids connected with others and I began to see levels of motivation and engagement from them that I had rarely seen before. We talked and wrote with kids around the world. Over the next few years we worked with classes in Los Angeles, Peru, Malaysia, Australia, China and Columbia to name a few. We found work arounds for kids to exchange videos, photos and drawings at a time when the technology to do these things wasn’t easy to use or didn’t exist. The kids in my small town had the world suddenly opened to them. Adults from all different walks of life, occupations, and parts of the world were open and willing to share information with them. I developed a blogging rubric, met with teachers from across the world, learned to pull together learning resources and communities on a shoestring and proved to the world that kids could be onboard in an ever flattening globe.
But, as the years have drifted by, I’ve seen a change. I’m not sure if it’s with me, or with the kids I teach, but the excitement of blogging has worn off. Over time, fewer kids began connecting on their own time using their classroom blogs. Fewer kids were interested in going that extra mile. The blogs in my classroom have always been a space where a combination of things have been posted online. Sometimes my students were required to write, but often it was their choice. Over time, the majorities of these spaces have become filled with only required pieces of writing. Fewer kids are choosing to write and choosing to connect with others over their learning.
The lights in many spaces are simply going dim….
Not to be a COM (Cranky Old Man), but I believe that services like Facebook, tumblr, instagram and twitter are a major cause of this. When we first started blogging in 2005, many of these online commercial services didn’t exist. It wasn’t necessarily easy to have a webpage and publish your stuff. But as these services have taken a strong hold on our culture and become increasingly amazingly easy to use, kids are connecting with others online on their own, outside of school. It has become common place.
This is a good thing, Really it is. As many people do, I have significant problems with Facebook in terms of privacy, bullying, etc, but as far as connections and constructing a social graph and presence, it is the place to be. The size of its network brooks little competition (for the moment at least). My only regret is that when students first practiced being online in supervised blog spaces, before moving to open commercial spaces, it was an opportunity for them to develop good habits in a place where they knew someone was watching. Now, I don’t believe that this is happening as much.
The popularity and commanlity of commercial online spaces early in life for most students needs to push classrooms into new directions. Blogging was fun. It was interesting. It was a motivating place for kids to have a voice and share something of themselves in a safe space. Now, for the most part, most of my students simply see a classroom blog as another assignment. Another requirement. A hoop they need to jump through.
All of these things are coming together to cause me to reexamine blogging in my classroom. I’ve always considered blogs, wikis and flickr to be three cornerstones of technology in my classroom. While we’ve used and experimented with many other services, these three have remained constant and in high use. Now I’m thinking that it is time to reexamine this practice and to look at changing. I often don’t feel that blogging in classrooms has really reached its full potential. Connecting kids and classrooms has always required a lot of extra effort by teachers to keep it moving and alive. I have rarely seen students in classrooms connect with the fluidity that open tech spaces enables and over time it has become a game of diminishing returns.
Where to from here?
I have absolutely no idea. It is one reason that I have hesitated to publish this post. I don’t have a solution or a road forward. I still believe that the benefits of networking students and their learning are powerful. I still believe that students benefit from global voices and perspectives in their lives. But I have no answer how to get them there.
Games?
Discussion forums?
Interest / passion based communities that exist outside of schools that we simply help them to locate and join?
Blogging is not a dying medium. I don’t believe that. But blogging in classrooms as a required space?
That may be something else all together.
Oh, man I’m in the same boat.
Good work! I’m glad you did post! I think blogs whether by/for teacher or by students are hugely foundational because writing (and other mediums compliment) is ultimately humanity. A massively vital skill that needs development. Schooling isn’t just about the content. Just because blogs are not NEW to many doesn’t mean we need to seriously consider abandonment. We don’t need to confuse newness of tools with innovation. It’s the IT trap. Our teens can get bored of anything if the activity lacks sound design. An activity with pencils on notepads can have them riveted. I think we need the blogging craft in the classroom more than ever just that we need to remind ourselves again what are we doing? Your post inspired me to draft something more tangible for tomorrow. -Al Smith Kelowna
Thanks Al for stopping by and your leaving your thoughts on this post. In my mind, you have a good point. Blogging is not new, but that is not why I am considering moving away from using them in my current format. I am considering this because I see diminishing returns when I do use them. For this same reason I no longer do things like run a formal spelling program in my classroom. I did this when I first started teaching, saw it was getting me nowhere and abandoned it in favour of something that is more effective. In my mind, this is proof that we can’t stand still with any teaching method. A constant evolution and evaluation our methods needs to be combined with critical reflection.
One thing that really helped me was moving to a whole class blog that everyone contributed to together. A million tiny islands got tiresome. One big continent is preferable to me. We also have public and private space. I’m using piazza for the later.
HI CLARENCE,
I did not yet read this about a connection blog/facebook, . Facebook has all kind of evil things, but do you know the same is true about blogging?
I do use Facebook to connect to students around the world and colleagues. It is possible to make groups in FB, and use the group for students.
Nice to meet youi
Jaap
Hey Clarence,
Thanks for this post that, while not exactly what I’m seeing in my class, I can identify with as I’ve been playing more with the possibility of a class blog as a conversation hub that is a *little* easier to keep track of. Having my Philosophy12 kids (many of whom cut their teeth on individual blogs back in TALONS9/10) use a class blog as a conversation space (where they are all authors) helped keep their thinking in a more linear fashion than the RSS bundle might have allowed in the past. For TALONS, who are in the same cohort for two years, the individual blogs are allowed to ‘breathe’ a little more, but for my semestered courses – where I’d still like there to be an online discussion component – the single hub has been a revelation, as it allows a space for my assignment/introductory unit posts, as well as all the follow up dialogue (categorized for the various units).
It’s made me think of the possible uses of the TALONS class blog, and if there isn’t something to be gained in a shared space, even if it sacrifices some of the ‘individual space & voice’ piece.
Interested in seeing where your experiment takes you.
Cheers from out west,
Bryan
Have you looked into the global classroom project or epals? Great connector there
Thank you for sharing your experience!
As a Social Media consultant, blogger and father I experience daily how we are changing (and change is a good thing) but also how things go in waves. Especially digital natives seem to be much less fixated on just one way to share their thoughts.
Social Media is about the social connections we make – the tool we use is secondary. I love to see an educator motivate others to create content – what and where is secondary. It’s still sharing, creating, thinking….
Frithjof
PS: I’m sharing your post in my list of favourite blog posts http://list.ly/2wt
Thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughts on this. I think you have raised a good point and one that I have tried to push with the kids in my class before. The tool we use is not important. Tools change and evolve. What is important is the network and the sharing of ideas that happens. I have tried to have the students in my class think about blogs as “containers” where they can put whatever kind of content they enjoy creating: photos, writing, video, drawing, etc. I am a bit sad to see this change with classroom blogging due to the fact that I believe blogs give us a long form space to explore what it means to be human. We can write and share of ourselves. But in the end, the tool is not important, the sharing and connecting is.
Blogging will come back – just like it is becoming more important for businesses. It’s all a matter of waves. Like in all revolutions, social media has to go through phases. The cange in us is faster than we ever experienced before.
One of the benefits of blogging compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc. is ownership. Even if you’re using Blogger or WordPress.com right now (or something like that), you still have the power to export your work later to your own install of WordPress (for example). I think speaking to students about ownership of their words, pictures, etc. is important. Perhaps we can pull them back into the blogging realim on this issue alone.
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Been thinking about this all day, since my students can’t blog as often as I want I haven’t made the focus on them finding a voice for themselves there. I can see how much of that has moved to other sm sites, but I do think that blogs still have a place.
One of the things I love Twitter for is the ability to find and meet new people that I would never have discovered using another tool (even blogging.) At first, like you I met many teachers online on blog spaces. Often the chance meetings there became something more, usually they did not though. Twitter allows me more real time access to people will encourages more sharing, at least in my opinion. I think much of this is due to our shared interest in education, it is the tie that binds.
I would argue that our students are not using social media to meet new people, or at least not as large of a pool as what we have access to. I can see how we can create student blogs to force the students to interact with people outside of their online community. What if we had students create passion blogs and also required them to find other blogs that are part of that passion to converse with? I can see this as an entry way into creating a different community they can learn from that could evolve into other social media places.
Clarence,
I appreciate your honesty. While I am not in the same boat when it comes to blogging this is my first time teaching in a classroom (I used to be a P.E. teacher) I have had similar with other tools and approaches to teaching. It takes a reflective practitioner to know when to abandon something that is not working for their students even when it goes against the mainstream. I hope you figure out what the “new” thing is that will get your kids excited about sharing their thoughts, reflections and voices. When you do, I look forward to learning from you.
Cheers,
Ju