Blogging in School

I recently attended a conference that included a lot of sessions about using technology in the classroom. Several controversial issues came up. Many of the speakers felt very strongly that teachers should be using YouTube, Facebook and blogs as apart of everyday instruction. Yet, many of these sight are not only not used but actually blocked in schools.

Should students use blogs in school? What are the benefits and what difficulties may arise? What is the purpose? Do the benefits outweigh the negative aspects?

Our students have kept journals for writing instruction since kindergarten. Those journals have always been paper and pencil and have had the express purpose of helping the student to learn to read and write. However, how many adults keep paper and pencil journals as compared to the number of adults who use blogs to record the events of their lives as well as their thoughts and feelings? Of all the students presently in our seventh grade, only a very few will ever regularly write in a paper journal for either professional or personal reasons. However, many may keep blogs. In order to prepare them for their future, teaching about blogs may have many benefits.

The writing process (pre-write, draft revise, edit and publish) may be taught through blogs, though pre-write would be difficult. Certainly the whole process is faster with blogs. Many people do read over their work and revise and edit before pushing that publish button.

The purposes of past journals have not been to include the entire writing process but instead to just give kids a chance to express themselves and practice writing. Certainly a blog could duplicate this process with the added benefit of easy publication and feedback through comments.

The ease of publication may be a big benefit to blogging. Kids may be more likely to do their best work if they know that it will be published and their classmates can read it and comment. Writing is for reading and communicating but past journals have often been shared sporadically with little feedback.

The main difficulty, as I see it, would be the matter of privacy. A student blog would need to be set up so that the student's right to privacy is not compromised. Posts would need to be available to other students but not the world in general. Students should also have some way to keep a post completely private if it contains information they do not want to share even with their teacher or classmate.

The teacher also needs a way to have control over the blogs so that she has control over any issues that arise and can deal with them in an expedient manner. This would mean that many blogging sites on the Internet would not be useful for this purpose.

Overall, I believe that the benefits of blogging outweigh the difficulties and that is why I am beginning to try some blogging with my summer students. Starting with only a few students seems like a good idea to me. We'll see what they think about it.