Ms. Minks mentions that people seem to think bloggers have too much time on their hands or that blogging is superficial. While it can be a great time-waster, it can also be deeply reflective and time-consuming. She links in her blog to a 2007 study out of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom that concluded that blogging benefited students and encouraged reflection as well as linked the students' lives outside of the classroom to the activities that they completed inside of it. The very idea that educational blogging has occupied a prominent enough position to be the subject of an academic study says to me that we cannot dismiss it as something that bored teenagers do when they feel like no one is listening to them.
Putting ideas into words has always helped me solidify my feelings on a subject and exposed when I do and do not understand something fully. If I can't summarize it, then I didn't get it. Both my undergraduate and graduate institutions placed a very high emphasis on reflection, and although it doesn't much matter to me whether I do that reflection on a piece of paper or online, there is no doubt that that early practice has stayed with me into my almost ten-year teaching career. I still take the time to jot a few notes after almost every lesson, and when I can take a moment to blog about them, I do it. I haven't done it much lately, but perhaps this will help jumpstart me back into the habit.
The one major benefit that blogging has over private journaling is that you can, if you so choose, open up your blog to the whole world. It is because of this access that I have confined my blogging to the professional domain; after all, I'm not sure that anyone really wants to hear my thoughts about "The Bachelor" or the latest Adele album (although I do have a lot of thoughts about both of those!). The great thing about blogging about teaching is that it immediately invites thousands of other teachers right into your classroom - if something went poorly, all of those other sets of (mostly supportive, because who really reads teacher blogs to fling mud?) experienced eyes can tell me exactly where I went wrong and how to fix it. One of the best and most fulfilling teaching experiences I have had is co-teaching. I know that some people don't like the idea of more adults in their classrooms, but I have always found that having another teacher in my room immediately lifts the caliber of my teacher. Not because I'm trying to show off, but because I have another professional whom I trust implicitly there to give me timely and specific feedback on my practice. Blogging about teaching is like having thousands of co-teachers available to me at a moment's notice.
Blogging is also one of the best practices in revision that I, as a writer and a teacher of writing, have ever experienced. Because my audience is potentially so large (not that my blogs have ever garnered a ton of attention, let's be clear about that), I'm much more careful about what I write and how I write it because I don't want to be misconstrued. I fact-check once, twice, and on the more controversial topics, three and four more times because I want to be absolutely sure I'm right. Isn't this what we want our students to do? I realized this was one of the best real-world writing exercises I could give my students as I was writing that last sentence and will now try to incorporate this into my teaching next year. We do online discussions fairly regularly, but I have never tried to use blogs because of the privacy issues. We'll see if I can make it work.
So...reflective practice in action. It was literally as I was typing those words that I realized I could make the revision point to my students with this example better than I ever could if their audience was just going to be their classmates and me. Because for better or for worse, sometimes kids in this generation care more about what the internet thinks than what I think. Why not use that to sneakily get them to use the right there/their/they're?
Love the analogy of blogging to co-teaching! I hadn't heard that before, but it's perfect. 100's of eyes if you build your audience. Ding, ding, ding on authentic audience and that's why you see many teachers blogging with their students. To ease you into the big, scary, world as an audience, you can start with quad blogging. That's when 4 teachers partner up their classes to blog together and provide a larger audience. You could do this by finding a partner in this class and having elementary and middle school classes blog together or reach beyond to find partners across the states or across the world.
ReplyDeleteI would love to quad blog! My Social Studies partner does work with Global Nomads, so the kids are already used to using Google+, and I use the discussion feature on Schoology to have them blog within our class, so I think it would probably be an easy thing to add to our curriculum. Maybe teachers at Skokie would be willing to partner up to begin with!
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