NEW KIDS ON THE BLoG

NEA Today, Oct 2005 by Flannery, Mary Ellen

Students and teachers are chatting it up on Web logs-the latest best thing since the overhead projector.

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes obscured text omitted.)

When Maeve, a Maine fifth-grader with a mammoth conscience, hears some troubling information about the Mars cocoa farms in West Africa, she doesn't whisper it across the lunch table-she announces it on her blog. Within minutes, her classmates furiously respond, hunting for the M's on their keyboard. "I am never going to buy M&M's again!" types one young activist. "Thank you for this information," writes another.

Junk-food discourse, summer vacation advice, and Red Sox statistics all fly across the wires in Lisa Plourde's writing workshop at the Connors-Emerson School in Bar Harbor, using fresh technology called Web logs or "blogs." A blog is a Web site that allows its author to type, type, type, and then receive comments from readers in a sort of digital conversation.

Rosie O'Donnell has one, as does NBC weatherman Al Roker. But so do Ally, Emma, Amethyst, Nick, Rebecca, Hadley, and the rest of Maeve's classmates in Bar Harbor, as well as thousands of teachers across the country.

"It's something that teachers really are starting to get their brains around," says Will Richardson, tech guru at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in New Jersey, and author of the premiere blog on blogging-www.weblogg-ed.com. "There are as many uses for this tool as your imagination can think of."

GET BLOGGING!

Many teacher blogs look like personal diaries and serve as virtual lounges, a place to kvetch and share inspiration with colleagues (see page 35 for more.) But the collaborative nature of Web logs also make them valuable instructional tools to connect students and teachers, and provide a new place to create Web-based content.

Post assignments, point kids to current events, and get them psyched about their studies-Richardson did all that as a journalism teacher with a daily Web log. (Read it at http://central.hcrhs.kl2.nj.us/journl/.)

Give online quizzes on it, as one precalculus teacher in Canada does. Or actually transfer some of your classroom discussions to a virtual room, as some English teachers do.

You know your kids regularly chat it up in cyberspace. So catch that online enthusiasm and steer it toward topics you prefer-such as Catcher in the Rye. "It might just be me," writes one teen to his classmates and teacher, "but it seems like everyone, especially teenagers, are just as critical of other people as Holden [the main character] is, or at least in the same ballpark. " (Check it out at http://period5englishlOh.blogspot.com/.)

In Lisa Plourde's classroom, the point is to get kids writing, and the blog does just that. With teens accounting for half of all bloggers, according to one study, this kind of assignment "speaks their language," says Richardson.

Plourde believes it's the public and immediate nature of blogging that so motivates her kids. "It's like writing in the clouds," she says. Anybody on Earth can read it, although usually it's just Alexa in the other fifth-grade class or Yuxi's mom.

"They don't consider it work!" Plourde marvels.

Plourde would never call herself a techie-she relies on Connors-Emerson's technology teacher Rick Barter to dot her corns. But setting up a blog is simple stuff, he says. You don't need to speak HTML or any other computer dialect. Just visit a Web site like www.blogger.com, walk through its three-step process to setting up a free account, and start writing.

MAKING IT WORK

Keep in mind that blogs are public and, if you're allowing students to post entries, you'll want to take precautions that adults wouldn't consider. At Connors-Emerson, all entries and responses are first sent to Plourde, who reviews the content, offers tips on grammar and clarity, and makes sure her students haven't revealed their home address or other personal information.

For Plourde, it's actually easier and quicker than lugging home a tote bag full of papers to correct, she says. Plus, their writing is "self-propelled," on topics they prefer, and in styles of their own choosing. Sean writes persuasively about Alaskan malamutes because he has one; but Bradley, who enjoys historical narratives, pens diary entries as if he's a Victorian girl, the daughter of the Duke of Divaulyn, reluctantly traveling to India with "fabulous gowns."

"Please write more!" Emma (virtually) shouts out. "You are really good at writing from someone's point of view/' writes Sarah. (But when Bradley sits down at his desk a few days later, after posting an unrelated poem, he's dismayed. "Nobody commented on my poem!" he complains aloud.)

Their enthusiasm is infectious, but Richardson encourages teachers to move beyond online diaries, like the ones at Connors-Emerson, and consider using Web logs as thinking tools. In his old journalism class, no trees were killed-every assignment was paperless. And, in a growing number of classrooms, particularly at the secondary level, many teachers are discovering that a Web log serves as the perfect catalyst for critical debate.