Blogging in the Classroom

My students and I have recently launched a separate blog for student writing, which will enable them to make comments on each other's work.

For teachers who want to learn more about classroom blogging, the National Writing Project has a post called Digital Toolbox: Blogs. Included is a brief YouTube video explaining how blogs can be used in different settings. Here's another version of the same video, called Blogs in Plain English, that includes subtitles in Spanish.

So what are the benefits of using a blog in school? For one, it's a great way to publish student work, and knowing that a broader audience will see their writing can be very motivating. My students' parents will proudly send links of their children's work to friends and family around the world, from New York to Moscow to Tel Aviv.

It also gives students a chance to read comments from peers, teachers, family and friends. Understanding what stands out to their readers can be encouraging and help students figure out how to improve their work. I have also appointed two co-editors for the blog. This is a position that needs to be earned through consistent hard work, but all students will eventually get a chance to take this on. Yet another incentive!

Listening to Blogging in the Classroom on WFCR radio in Amherst, Mass., I heard several teachers discussing how technology had helped their students. They said having a blog motivated kids to produce higher quality work and enabled them to connect with students from other schools. Blogging was also seen as a great way to create a positive writing community.

Full of ideas

My students and I recently made it through the brainstorming stage, and I must say, facilitating this part of the process has not always been easy for me. When it comes to my own writing, I run through this stage automatically, barely aware that I'm doing it. At one point, my mind seems a bit like the blackboard in the photo to the left: I have a million ideas, but there's no sense of how they might work together. Some of the ideas will be kept, but most will not. Still, there's an energy to the process that keeps my mind moving, generating ideas until I hit upon the ones that will eventually stand out for me as the ones.

But just because I know how to do this with my own thoughts, does it necessarily mean that I know how to bring order to the thoughts in my students' heads? Or that I can always spark the energy and sense of urgency that get the ideas flowing in the first place?

I'm going to have to say no -- but as it turns out, that's OK, because there's a slew of (perfectly free!) material out there that's been helping me to accomplish it anyway.

As part of our work on the Six Traits of Writing, we are focusing on idea development, which involves recalling and recording memorable details. This graphic organizer on the five senses helped students to focus on what they observe in everyday situations. To make the activity more specific, I asked them to list what they would see, hear, taste, smell and touch at the following locations: a bakery, a beach, an amusement park, and a playground. Then we worked to come up with language that was more precise and descriptive, and students recorded the words they planned to use. For example, at a bakery we said we would smell aromas wafting through the air; at a beach we would feel the grittiness of the sand in our shoes; and at an amusement park we might hear the whine of the machinery as a ride got off the ground.

I also love these idea development post-it notes, which say things like, "I used a balance of showing and telling," and "My details try to paint a picture in the reader’s head." I affixed a checklist on each child's paper. For first drafts, they used these idea development worksheets , which also feature a checklist at the end.

I would also like to try the describing wheel , which seems like it would be great for taking a single detail and coming up with many interesting ways to describe it. To identify the audience and refine purpose, I like this planning chart. The inverted triangle is good for narrowing down a topic.

Idea development: getting started

The first of the Six Traits of Writing that I'll be tackling with my students is idea development, which can actually be broken down into a number of sub-skills:

* using strong and memorable details
* balancing showing and telling
* writing about unique topics
* developing an original idea within a safe frame
* exploring themes and theses, big topics and sub-topics
* self-reflecting to write about what you know

It's amazing what resources teachers are willing to share online. I'm currently smitten with WritingFix, which has an entire section on idea development. On the same site, I also found the following song, attributed to "Mrs. Stelle." Thanks, Mrs. Stelle!

Ideas
To the tune: She’ll be Comin’ Around the Mountain
by Mrs. Stelle

Can you tell me what makes up a good idea?
Can you tell me what defines a good idea?
A single topic, clear and focused,
with fresh insights that provoke us,
anecdotes “though not required”
can cinch the deal.

If your story is a bore or moves too slow,
if it wanders off the topic it’s a “NO”,
you must answer readers’ questions
using details and suggestions
all while telling us what
we don’t already know.

If you want for your ideas to score a four,
then you’ll have to spin a yarn that gives us more,
than just a list of things you did once
that impressed the other kids once--
we’ve all read a thousand papers
before yours!

Just the Right Wordle

If you like the image above -- essentially a colorful arrangement of the most frequently used words on this blog -- you can thank Wordle for that. Wordle is a Web-based tool that generates a design from a group of words. You can either type in text of your own or have the tool pull from a particular Web site. The words will vary in size and color; the ones used most frequently in the original text will appear as the largest in the resulting image. These "word clouds" can then be saved using screen capture software.

While it isn't hard to see what makes Wordle fun, I can't say I immediately appreciated how useful it could be in the classroom. A quick search on the Web turned up a number of great ideas, though. My favorite resource so far is a slideshow posted by Jennifer Wagner. In it, she suggests using Wordle to summarize political speeches, reinforce class rules, create unique reports, and correctly display words that are frequently misspelled.

Rodd Lucier of The Clever Sheep shares his top 20 uses, which include converting student essays into posters and creating visual introductions to new themes or chapters. I don't know which to try first.