This post has been sitting in my drafts for sometime now. In October, around the time I started teaching the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I decided that I needed to incorporate a new piece of technology into my classroom. I thought that Blogger could be something really useful for my students, although I had mixed feelings about it.
As a teacher, I know it is important to have connections to professional teaching organizations. As a graduate student I was required to take one rhetoric course (looking back on it--I probably should have taken more). I was lucky that at UNC Charlotte, there is a rhetoric course for English Graduate students that is tailored for writing instruction. The class is led by the UNC Charlotte's chapter of the National Writing Project. This is a group that I am super familiar with, as 1 of my college professors and 2 of my high school teachers are now leads in the Charlotte program. My sophomore and junior years of high school English were molded by this program and I was eager to learn the pedagogy behind it so that I could better incorporate the tools in my own classroom. One of the biggest tools promoted by the National Writing project is the Daybook (not a journal or diary). The daybook is compared to the kitchen junk drawer--a place for all of your writing and ideas--no matter how good or bad. The idea is that students are building their own ideas and critical thinking skills by engaging directly with them in the daybook. The daybook is a messy place, full of random thoughts, drafts and other writings that provide inspiration. I love the daybook, and each year I keep my own where I write lesson plans, reflections on discussions, ideas that students share among other things.
Each student in my AP classes is required to have a daybook. They write in the daybook almost daily, although I realized that the daybook is coveted by them--they don't want people to look in it and when they share, students will opt to summarize their writing instead of actually sharing it. This is where I got the idea of blogger. With blogger, I could have students write in their own "digital" daybook and it would be shared with me. Students could also look at other student's writing after it was published.
When making this transition, I knew there would be some possible pitfalls. First, the daybook is a place for writing--both good and bad. I write really ridiculous things in my daybook, unconcerned about grammar structure, spelling or even if the idea fully makes sense. The idea is that the idea is there and I can revisit it and tweak it later (if it proves useful). When using blogger, the writing is public and published. That adds pressure for the the writing to be "good." I have tried to find ways around that, designating that some blog posts are purely for ideas and should be written as quickly as possible (so the ideas don't get lost). I have found that students have been receptive to this when they understand it is for a very specific purpose (like getting feedback on a potential essay topic).
As I reflect, I think next year I want to transition to a digital daybook exclusively. Students could maintain a blog for daily writing and for homework writing. I would like them to start embedding things into the blog as inspiration--something we haven't done yet. I am still trying to figure out how to integrate different types of writing, which will mean that tags may become useful. I am wondering too, if I could easily incorporate this for my 9th graders next semester? I would need to plan out the logistics of getting them to set up a blog but the more I think about it, the better it could be for my interaction with them while I'm gone.
Just thoughts here...no real purpose. I will need to revisit these ramblings :)
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