What would students say?
Wednesday, April 13th, 2005“What would students say?” asks Bud Hunt on his Bud the Teacher
blog. I love that question!! In fact, I think it is my favorite
question because it is getting students in on this important
conversation. Bud is responding to the issue of “What is blogging?”
that Will has addressed in many of his posts.
Bud goes on to say…….
For better or worse, I agree with him. Blogging is a unique set of
skills and much of what my students are doing on their personal blogs
(journaling and ranting, mostly, according to one student) isn’t really
what I’d like to see in the classroom. But I wonder how many students
are actually participating in this conversation. Are adults once again
making decisions for students without their input? Wouldn’t it be
terrible if the decisions about blog use in classrooms were all made for students, instead of with them?
I highlighted
this second question as it is a crucial question that needs to be
asked. Bud has shared this debate with his students and will be sharing
their input with us. I look forward to that.
I
think we need to work hard at providing good models of how it can work
in educational circles. That means getting students blogging.
Bud has many good posts that I have been thinking about. In particular, his one on mistakes and the one on assessment.
I am struggling with both issues and will come back to them. I have to
say though how much I appreciate Bud’s reflections. Reflections like
his and others in our “edublogging” community make me think and I love
it! It took me back to a post I made to last year’s student webloggers.
The post was Think Possibilities. I tried to explain blogging to my students.
Bud refers to Will’s words about blogging. They are well worth repeating.
But I’ve never in my life written the way I write in this Weblog. And
frankly, I don’t know that I’ve learned as much from any other type of
activity as I have from this type. And I learn when I’m doing just what
I’m doing now (sweat on brow.) I’m not journaling. I’m not just
linking. I’m attempting to synthesize a lot of disparate ideas from a
varitey of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for
an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking
further. That’s the essence of blogging to me, and I can’t do it without a Weblog.
That’s the distinction. That’s what tells me this is different. And
that’s what makes me think so hard about the effects that blogging, not
just using a blog, might have in a classroom.
So, not only do
we need students blogging but we need to get more educators “blogging”,
as defined above. Then all the good educational examples of blogging will
speak for themselves.
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