Adventures in Educational Blogging

The students began commenting on each other’s blogs today, and it was a joyful experience.

They poured over them and our usually quiet blog session was suddenly punctuated with shouts of, “Hey! I’m reading your blog right now,” or “This is so cool!” Their comments spilled out into the pages.

We’d set the guidelines that comments should focus on what was written or how it was written. As we explained it, they had worked hard on these posts and deserved thoughtful comments.

For the comments regarding what was written, we likened it to their book club strategy of making text-to-self, text-to-text, or text-to-world connections. A number of students followed through on this. For example, when responding to one student’s post about how much she disliked wearing a school uniform, another student wrote…

I agree that it’s not that maybe it’s alittle boring to wear that same kind of cloth every day! But it’s good, too. because in Sweden, where I come from, people got teased because they wore something ugly, etc. But of course I agree to you!

Another student responding to a post on go-carts, commented that…

I need those tips so thanks! I thought it was a real awesome blog! What are apexes? And although it rocked mabey you could tell people where you can go to go – kart. Other wise it was awesome!

Another student took literally the idea of commenting on how the blog was written. She made the accurate observation that…

…maybe you should change the yellow writing into a different color because it really hard to read.

Another type of comment that appeared quite frequently made reference to their personal connections outside of the blog. For example, the class is preparing to perform an adaptation of Shakespeare’s MidSummer Night’s Dream. When responding to a post about the blogger’s dog, one student wrote…

… it must be very sad losing your dogs, but you are always happy. Good job being Prospero!!

A final type of comments made by the students really has me thinking. One of the quieter students went in and left friendly little comments in many of the blogs. Here is an example…

I can’t help commenting your blog!!!! Happy B-day!!!! I love chocolates too!

I’m going to watch to see if she gets responses. I wonder if they will go to her blog to comment, or leave a message in their own blog, or if the messages will go unremarked upon. I’m willing them to respond to her.

Overall, the students were very equitable in their commenting. Many of them started at the top and responded to every child’s blog, even if they had nothing to say about it. At first this distressed me a bit, but as I read on, I realized that what the “say nothing” posts were really saying was…

I heard you! You sent your ideas out into the world, and I heard them. You are part of our blogging community.

Wow! How could I have thought they weren’t saying anything when they were really saying something as powerful, as validating as that?

[Correction: Kent’s class is performing “MidSummer Night’s Dream”. Prospero is from “The Tempest” which is the play Tammy’s class is performing.]

Friday was a day of intense blog activity. As is typical with any class, the longer an activity runs, the more spread out the students become in terms of project completion. We now have some students publishing their third post and some students who are not yet done with their first. They all want to conference, are all in our faces saying, “Please check mine so I can publish.” Tammy and I met after school to discuss this frustration.

To resolve this bottleneck, we are going to establish the following flow chart.

1. Write this week’s blog posting.
2. Make revisions.
3. Run spell check and edit your posting
4. Have someone else read it. Make needed changes.
5. Conference with a teacher. Make needed changes.
6. Final conference with teacher. Publish.
7. Spend time reading and commenting on other students’ blogs.
8. Start your next posting. Teachers will not conference with you until everyone has posted this week’s blog (unless the teacher has free time).

We will start our next session with a discussion about comments. They may give two types of comments. One type is to respond to what the person wrote. For example, one student wrote about go-carts. That is a topic I don’t know much about, so I had real questions to ask him. Another type of feedback is about how they wrote it. The J.H.H. Bloggers are skilled at this, and some of the comments our students left for them were genuine and constructive. We’d like to build on that. I’ll try to pull some of their examples to have on hand.

Hopefully, the comments will be motivating and helpful to the bloggers, and they should buy the teachers a bit of breathing space to meet with the students who most need to conference.

Despite our progress on this blogging project, our to-do list is still growing…

• Ensemble is being quirky. It opens and starts its downloads, and then crashes. I’ll try dumping the preferences and repairing permissions on this computer AGAIN.
• Jabiz still needs to insert the sidebar of blog addresses into each blog’s template. This will make it easy for our bloggers and our visitors to navigate between the blogs.
• I need to invite our student and teacher guests to start visiting our blogs.
• I want to research Trackback. I’m not certain how it works and if it would be of value in this exercise.
• We need to give the students time and guidelines for comment on each other’s blogs. We also need to share that information with our student guests.

We’ll get there. I just hope we arrive before the end of the year.