Blogging in the English Classroom

The potential for using weblogs in the English classroom is well established, but not yet fully explored. I teach Senior English and Advanced Placement Language and Composition in a city high school. Weblogs are perfectly suited to helping teachers and students meet the standards set forth by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE, 2009). Although blogging can help us meet all of these standards in one way or another, the interactive nature of the technology is particularly appropriate for a few. In particular:

• “3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).”

Weblogs not only work as a resource for comprehending texts, through access to other readers’ literary analysis, but also offer a powerful opportunity to interact with other readers, not only within a class, but throughout the global community.

• “4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.”

Too often, students write only for their teachers or classmates. This hardly qualifies as a real “variety of audiences.” Blogging offers the opportunity to write with genuine purpose to a larger and more diverse readership.

• “5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

Blogging motivates students to use a writing process including careful revision to improve the quality of their work for the larger audience the Internet provides. Moreover, blogging can radically change the writing process students use by giving them more powerful research tools and a community of peers to help them refine their thinking and writing.

• “6. Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and non-print texts.”

This standard seems to have been written with blogging in mind. Not only are students more careful writers when they know they have an authentic audience, they are encouraged to actively participate in complex discussions of literature by posting in their own and others’ blogs. Needless to say, the “media techniques” standard is a natural fit.

• “7. Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and non-print texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.”

Blogging and RSS feeds have already changed the way many of us do research. Students can use these technologies to simplify and broaden their research, and can gain access to sources (perhaps the authors of the books they are reading in class) that may not have been available in the past.

• “8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.”

Little explanation is required to demonstrate the propriety of blogging for meeting this standard.

• “11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.”

This standard was very difficult to genuinely meet before the advent of the Read/Write Web. Blogging allows for easy access to “a variety of literacy communities.”

I have spoken with the Executive Director of my school system to discuss the problem of blogging in our system. As it stands, the Bess Internet filter blocks all access to personal pages and blogs in our school system. Fortunately, the forward thinking authors of our English IV curriculum included a class blog as a required assignment for Senior English. I hope to get Blogger.com and other blog sites unblocked so that my students can build their own class blogs where they can meet these NCTE standards.

In the future, I would also like to have each of my students use blogging to build online portfolios of their writing so that they may have a permanent archive of their own work. Here, they could revisit and revise their writing throughout their lives.

Another application I envision for blogging is inspired by the film Freedom Writers. My students have, in the past, put together class anthologies of students’ poetry, essays, and short stories. Blogging would allow us to generate these anthologies online and instantly publish them to an unlimited audience.

I also hope that blogging will one day allow my students to conduct research using RSS aggregators to gather information on their topics and deliver it to my students for review, selection, and synthesis (Richardson, 2006).

Just the class blog alone will give my students a place to showcase their work, interact with other writers, share critical analyses of literature, and find a genuine purpose in project-based social learning.

REFERENCES

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). (2009).  NCTE / IRA standards for the English language arts.  National Council of Teachers of English.  Retrieved September 16, 2009, from http://www.ncte.org/standards
Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.