My new 4th-grade bloggers are having a good time. They come in each morning and a few of them go around and make sure that all of the computers are up and pointed at the blogging page. The rest of them sit down with the portable keyboards.
Good thing I set up the blog application the way that I did. I configured it so that I retained control of the publish button. Not that it would have been a big deal if some of the stuff they did went out on the web, but I did have to delete a few things. So we’ve been talking this week about what blogging is – and what it is not.
Comments: When they discovered the comments feature, a few of them started writing personal messages to each other. One thing that blogging is not, is email, I told them. I didn’t anticipate this, but I might have if I’d thought about it. The admin panel had a button for receiving email when a comment was made. I have a special classroom email account that has been largely dormant since I set it up. But I made use of it this week. There was a flurry of commenting going on and I was busy each morning reading it. So we made a rule – comments should refer to the blog post only. One of the kids spoke up, “That’s why they call them *comments.*
Personal information: One of my more enterprising boys decided that he would start a joke site. His first post solicited jokes from his readers and invited them to send them to his personal email address. “No, No, No”, I told him. He was very annoyed with me. But I lectured him at length about my unwillingness to allow him to use his blog to start email correspondences with anyone in the known universe.
The other thing that came up with this is the tendency of the kids to write about each other without asking if the friend minds being mentioned by name. So another rule was instituted – no names without permission.
Quality: I’ve been busy checking the site each day. Until now they have not, for the most part, been too concerned with spelling. That began to change this week, too. I’m really glad about that. It validates my hunch that the presence of an audience larger than teacher & parent readers would make them more self-conscious about the correctness of their writing. I’ve been asked about correct spellings in the last week more than in the whole year up to this point.
Topic choice: Wide open. Some are writing personal narratives, others are going for creative fiction. I’m not going to dictate what they write about all the time. But I will sometimes. On Friday, I told them about Earth Day and suggested that would be a good subject to write about. Many wrote about protecting the environment.
The development of a critical voice is my ultimate goal for their writing. This group doesn’t have enough time left to work with me to really develop that, but I think that it is truly an attainable goal, given enough time. I believe that if we spend class time – maybe before writing – talking about things that are in the paper each day, the kids will naturally start to write about current events.
