New Kids on the Blog

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

By Mary Ellen Flannery

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.k12.nj.us/journ1/ .)

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://period5english10h.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 coms. 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.

One kid posts, another responds, a third jumps in with a link to more evidence on the Web. It's a 21st century conversation, and it prepares students for a future where they work with other people, take and give feedback.

When you write on paper, your words are self-contained—"It's on paper and it doesn't go anywhere," Richardson reflects. But when you ask students to blog, "you're asking them to go somewhere."

A Techno-tionary: Hip conversation!

blog: A blog is a Web site where you can write whatever you want, and then visitors to your site can add comments, if they like. Many look like personal diaries. Some have political content.

podcast: This is similar to an audioblog—a person can create audio files and then their listeners can download the file and listen to it whenever they have time. Check out www.podcast.net for a long list of available podcasts.

wiki: A wiki is sort of like a blog. Both are on the Internet and both provide a casual way to write about stuff, but a wiki is written by many people who can edit any part of it. A great example is www.wikipedia.org.

Turn it up!

Every iMac in the Connors-Emerson lab comes equipped with software called Garageband. It is basically what it sounds like—a venue for amateur musicians to make a little noise.

When Lisa Plourde's students have finished blogging, they start mixing rhythms and instrumental lines to create songs. Take a little piano, something in a George Winston vein, and combine it with a cowbell. (Or not.) Lay down the drums, add an electric guitar line, up the tempo—all right, now we're cooking!

 Lest we forget, this is still a writing workshop. So Plourde encourages her young writers to combine their compositions—poetry and music—into single productions. Last year, they completed an audio poetry project, reading aloud their ruminations while their own songs played in the background.

Check it out at http://blue1.emerson.u98.k12.me.us/magazine/audiopoetry05 .

Blogging on

The stories your colleagues could tell… and do! More than ever, under the anonymous cover of the Internet, teachers are downloading their daily frustrations, aggravations, and occasional satisfactions.

"It's the first thing I do when I get home," says La Maestra, author of A Contar, the daily tale of a bilingual educator in Texas. (At http://acontar.blogspot.com/—but be warned, La Maestra gets an R-rating from us for language!)

For La Maestra or Ms. Frizzle or Posthipchick, the blog isn't just a teaching tool, aimed at motivating students. It's a way to remember the details of their jam-packed day, turn on their inner comedian, and activate their politics. After a day spent basically alone—well, except for those 34 kids—the blog serves as a welcome way to decompress, says the pseudonymous Ms. Frizzle, who writes at http://msfrizzle.blogspot.com/.

It's cheap therapy—and it's particularly valuable for new teachers. You might not want to tell Mrs. Delaney in the next room that you dearly wish you'd looked twice at an accounting degree—but you can freely tell your tales of woe to strangers, who often offer a bit of nonjudgmental advice.

"There are books out there about first-year teachers who manage to spin gold out of air, but I wanted to read about teachers who were struggling, who were crying every day, who felt like they weren't making a difference. I couldn't find anything, so I wrote about it instead," said Posthipchick, a first-year teacher in California. (Like almost all bloggers, Ms. Chick keeps her name and location on the down-low, but she told us she's a proud NEA member. For more from her, go to http://posthipchick.blogspot.com/ .)

But many bloggers hope "civilians" are logging on too—if only so they can hear what it's really like to teach. "Everyone in the world has an opinion on education and the state of the public schools, but how many people have been in one recently?" writes Ms. Frizzle. "I blog not to provide definitive answers but to give one teacher's inside perspective."

Echoes the Ramblin' Educat, a young Oklahoma teacher (and building rep for her high school!) who writes at http://educat.blogspot.com/ — "I want to show that in a political climate where educators are derided for 'not working hard enough' or 'choosing an easy road,' my friends and I work hard!"

Many teacher Web logs are more overt about their advocacy—they serve to point a wagging finger at the No Child Left Behind law, shout about vouchers, and encourage debate on all sorts of issues. (Check out http://folkbum.blogspot.com/, www.shutupandteach.org, and www.assortedstuff.com/ .)

But almost all are just plain entertaining, as your colleagues go whole blog..

excerpt From Hipteacher

— an NEA member in Georgia, who blogs at http://hipteacher.typepad.com/

Teachers all over the school, quietly about their business, suddenly perk up, drop everything and start running to the same location. Nearby students look up in wonder. What's going on? When I was a student teacher, I looked up in wonder. What's going on? But today, in the hallway going to duty, I received another reminder that I really am a teacher now.

I felt the fight before I even saw it.

And I ran. I don't know what I thought I was gonna do when I arrived, but, by golly, I ran. I ran with the teachers.