EduBlog Insights

board members I’ve respected and appreciated, others shall I say,

we’ve had a prickly past. This is yet one more thing I’ve grown to love

about blogging. BoardBuzz has given me a whole new prospective on

school boards and what they are doing. I really like the wide range of

topics that are covered and the personal touch from the excellent

writers adds so much. They are professional and yes, even prickly at

times. Prickly  in a very good way, I might add. They allow

comments. I

love that! I did find out that they have to be approved by an

administrator but I don’t find that all bad. Those of us in education

know the kind of comments that sometimes can be hurled our way. There

aren’t a whole lot of comments on the blog. I hope that changes. Check

it out. You might want to leave a comment or two. I had posted before

Primary in Glasgow, Scotland. The students celebrated National Poetry

day 2005 by writing a Keepers Poem. The poem was inspired by The

Keepers Poetry Project which is inspired by the original Keepers poem

by Phil Whitehead. John Johnston is the teacher who put this incredible

project together. These children are in primary 2 to 7. They wrote 150 verses, blogged them and then

created the podcast. John writes a most helpful description of the

project here. He offers his suggestions and thoughts. Ewan posts about it here and

proclaims it “A real success that can be emulated in any school.” I

couldn’t agree more.

Having both the blogs and the podcast is a dynamite combination. I love

this type of engagement by the students. I was spellbound as I listened

to their beautiful voices. What a powerful way to bring poetry into

their lives and their reader’s lives. Then as I was reading through the

blog, this comment from Phil Whitehead:

Now that just tops it off! Great work from our fellow educators in

Scotland! You just know this teacher is fostering the love of reading,

and 20 secondary schools entered the final round of this competition

where their blogs were evaluated in terms of the depth and clarity of

thought as well as the creativity of presentation by a panel.

Some 18,00 unique votes were cast by online readers for the school blogs.

perspectives of the student bloggers on a myriad of issues.” It was jointly organized by the Education Ministry and Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), the country’s biggest player in the telecoms market.

we blog, we write to a real audience, to someone out there who might be

reading and, most importantly, responding to our blogs.  Through this we learn new ideas, gain new perspectives, and learn to appreciate alternative views.”

hope our participants have also learnt that because we are writing to a

real audience, what we say has a real impact. We have to be sensitive

Victoria Junior College and Nanyang Girls’ High School emerged as the champions. The school blogs can be read at Campus MoBlog.

Take some time and read through some of these blogs. These students are

really blogging their  thinking and there are many intriguing reads. I will

be back to these blogs to read some more.

written by one of the high school students. (You’ll need to scroll down

is the second story in my “Projects Series” posts for those of you who

wanted more details about weblog projects I have initiated.

The premise for this weblog project was that weblogs could be used as

an effective tool to foster cooperative learning between native

English-speaking students and ESL (English as a Second Language)

fifth-grade students. Providing opportuniities for increased socal,

academic, and technological participation facilitates the process by

which ESL students can more quickly and efficiently develop their

communicative language skills. The native English-speaking students

also enhance their language skills and have the opportunity to practice

helping others with skills they have already internalized. Cooperative

learning improves language achievement and interaction between the two

groups of students. Students of different ethnic backgrounds have much

to learn from each other.

One of the students could speak no English when the year began. Other

ESL students translated what we were doing and what we were talking

about. He would share his thoughts with us and a student would help him

translate the thoughts to English. He would blog the translation himself,

after our discussions. As the year progressed, he became more and more

independent and ended up being one of the “helpers” for other ESL

students in the group.

I used Manila software and began

with the students contibuting to the class weblog. After a few weeks,

they created their own weblogs.I shared the project through a class

weblog with

posting to other educational webloggers. The other educators read the

thoughts expressed and, in turn, added their own. My students entered

these discussions and were really amazed that other people were so

interested in what they were writing and learning. This led to

incredible dialogue between both students and teachers. Students began

to be motivated to write more and believed they had something important

to say.They did! Receiving feedback from others on the comments

section of the weblog made them feel valued. When somebody affirmed

their thoughts it was encouraging to the students. I used the class

weblog as a springboard for class discussions. This gave students

ownership of the project.

posts from some of my weblogging friends this week.  They make me

think. In turn, I will then write on my weblog and others begin to

think about what I wrote in response to a friend’s post.  Sometimes I

write about something I have read that makes me want to explore and

find out even more about what I think and others think.  It’s a great

way to learn - it’s real, it’s a way to share and grow with others, and

it is an exciting way to learn.  Now I have to be motivated, I have to

work hard, and I have to really think and write about things of

interest to me. What’s great about it is that I am part of a community

that really cares about education. You won’t believe what our main

focus is in our edublogging community - you guys and all the students

from many different states and countries.  We view weblogs as a place

to give you a voice and we want to oversee that process in ways that

will make you good thinkers and continue to develop as good citizens of

our world. Writing what you think and writing it well can be one of the

greatest gifts you can give yourself.  What’s even better is that we

can have a lot of fun on the journey.”

This type of dialogue, teacher-guidance, problem solving, and peer

collaboration enhances the process of using writing to make meaning.

Connections begin to emerge from a variety of sources and writing

emerges in a way to show what the student knows and how they are

thinking.

Lots of language experience type activitities were built into the

sessions. We even created a side weblog called “Idioms Are Fun!” This

weblog was a place to talk about idioms, their meanings, and their

origins. Students wrote sentences, illustrated them, and even wrote

stories. The objective was to give the students practice using idioms

in a fun way. This helped the ESL students internalize the meanings of

expressions, the hidden meanings, not the literal meaning. As different

student writings on idioms were highlighted and celebrated in class,

the other students would use the comment feature to create their own

sentences using the respective idiom. This weblog did not require huge

maintenance time and gave the students the needed practice using the

English language. They loved sharing idioms, and vocabulary usage

soared. They “got a kick” out of learning idioms! This love of language

have done with students. People want to know the details. I thought a blog post giving some details about each

project might be helpful for those interested in a more specific “how-to”. I’ll

group of fourth and fifth graders as a springboard to teach critical thinking

skills and media awareness, and to make connections with the school’s

curriculum objectives. We met two to three hours a week to work on this

project. NewsQuest was the weblog I used to keep a record of our learning

journey, both student and teacher. This was our class weblog. The software I

used was Manila.

After I posted for a short time, students began posting on the class

blog. They

were contributing editors. Manila

software lets you read the contributing editors posts and then

“release” them to

the blog. This software had different editor roles that you can choose

for

participants. The person in charge is called the managing editor. After

another

short time of the students posting on the class blog, they each created

their

own personal blog. Links to these student blogs are on the NewsQuest

blog. Students got to choose the template and do other management

tasks.

For a time I asked them to let me see their posts before they actually

released

it themselves but we progressed to peers checking their work to times

when

there was no checking, except for their own proofreading. The goal was

to get the students writing and thinking.

They discussed the news, wrote about their heroes, wrote poetry,

expressed

their opinions, stated what they liked about using weblogs, and wrote

about a

variety of topics. They had choices within these perimeters. Sometimes

I made

the writing choices for them. Students made connections to what they

were

studying in class as they practiced their writing skills.

I

received an email from Will Richardson, a fellow blogger who said, “This is

good stuff, Anne. Don’t you think it’s time my journalism students got together

with your journalism students?” That led to an exciting collaboration between

his class in New Jersey and mine in Georgia.

This was the beginning of the Georgia-New Jersey Connection. The high school

students mentored the elementary students. They corresponded back and forth on

the elementary student weblogs. Dialogue flowed between the teachers, the

students a voice they had not had before and led to learning discoveries.

Meredith and Kristen, two resourceful high school students, on their own,

color-coded the different elements of a news article, thus providing a visual

tool to help the younger students clearly see the different parts of a news

very important. We have to create an atmosphere that promotes a give-and-take

between student and teacher, student and student, and also a give-and-take

between the student, teacher and those responding outside of the classroom.

Students need to feel free to write what they’re really thinking. Then we can

enter the process and counsel students how to write responsibly while they

still can maintain their unique voice. I do think we have to be overseeing the

process. I don’t view that as vetoing what they write. I view it as responsible

teaching and a way to empower students to make their voice count. (Remember

for teachers. All comments come to your email. So the students had blogs but I

was the managing editor. I didn’t write on their blogs but I had access to

them. The students knew this. It is important to spend time talking with them

about your decisions, what you want to achieve as a group, and how weblogs can

from the high school students as well as random comments from others outside

our classroom. I would ask for volunteers as I was out and about. For example,

I had a friend from Paris

post a comment. The students were amazed someone from Paris was interested in their writing. Think

friends, school board members, senior citizens, family, etc. Don’t ask

The blog provided parents with a

window into their child’s school world that coud be easily accessed from the

web. My online record of the journey through the class weblog documented the

me how blogging may be used in the classroom?” Now that’s a question

that was asked of Tom that I would like to answer. First, I’d like to

refer you to a couple of previous posts I’ve made on this topic. One

was Ways to use weblogs in education and the other is Weblog think

abouts. Perhaps those will help anyone thinking about blogging in the

classroom. As I reread the posts, I kept thinking that I need to update

them and then my next thought was how all this is still just in the

process stage and who knows really where all this will lead.

I think there are many ways to use  blogs in the classroom.No,

there’s not a right way and a wrong way but I do definitely have my own

opinions about ways I would like to see them used. First and foremost,

I would like to see them used with students in ways that help them

better writers and thinkers. And just putting students on blogs does

not make this happen. The teacher makes it happen. I’ve talked before

about the conversations and the connections you can make with students.

It’s important to talk to the students about what is happening.That is

crucial. I use my teacher blog with the elementary students to do that.

I’d start each class off sort of touching base with what I was

writing.Many times I would highlight what a student or another blogger

wrote. We have to talk about what is going on with their blogs. Who

have they heard from? Do they agree? Do they disagree? We talk about

what they are learning. We make connections to how this affects them

and our world. Are they excited about it? Do they understand it? What

questions come to mind? Where might we go to find answers. Then after

the discussions it’s back to the blogging. I think maybe we need to

spend more time talking about this aspect of blogging. The

conversations motivate the students to see themselves as writers who

have something to contribute. I also think we educators can learn a

great deal from the students by observing and listening to what the students have to say.

Having the larger community a weblog provides does make a difference. We can’t get that

from other avenues. I often reads bits of other educator blogs to the

students. It stretches them and I found that their writing and thinking

improved as a result. I don’t have all the answers but I’m still

exploring and learning.

Another thing that makes a difference with weblogs is that the students

are amazed when they realize that someone outside the classroom cares

about what they are writing. It makes quite a difference. Again the

teacher is the one here who needs to help that happen, if it doesn’t of its own accord.

I love the process of building this type of learning together. We truly

are guiding and learning right along with them, not just lecturing. So I encourage you to enter the world

of blogging in your classroom but first spend some time really thinking

Now I know I am totally biased but my students have outdone

themselves. You can see the PowerPoint with all the bells and

(The bells and whistles one is more fun!)  I plan to put it in a

book format later but time is just running out right now and I wanted

to get it up for the students to see.

The tutorial shows you how to sign up and subscribe to blogs with

Bloglines but doesn’t stop there. It also shows you some other

interesting things you can do with Bloglines. Here’s the outline:

to this post which provide even more tips and responses really adds to