Borderland

From my post, Who Knows Yet, a new idea for classroom blogging occurred to me that I put into practice today. Too bad it’s so close to the end of the year, because this promises to become a mainstay of my instructional repertoire for Language Arts.

Exploring Subversive Potential

My main point with the blog post is that we haven’t really come to terms with all the possibilities for classroom blogs. The blogging form and blogging software is too subversive to be neatly pigeon-holed into a “best-practices-for-blogs” list that narrowly defines the possibilities for their use in classrooms. As James Farmer points out, blogging tools are subversive enough to suit a wide range of purposes.

• I asked the question, What form does responsible, but immature, participation in online conversations take? because I don’t think we’ve seen a lot of examples of what a classroom website that invites kid-participation can be. (Compared to the volume of stuff on the web, 10,000 classroom sites might begin to scratch the surface.)
• Marco Polo commented, …how about asking the kids themselves? Or “asking” by observing what they do?
• A commenter named Paul added, I think I agree with Marco Polo when he says we should ask the kids. My idea, but I haven’t gotten to it yet, was to publish my own teacher’s blog and let the kids either comment or make their own posts.

New Pieces Loosely Joining

And this is where the lightbulb went on for me. There was apparently a readiness on my part to hear something one more time, something that I hadn’t given enough attention to. The value of the comments was that they triggered a thought that cascaded, moving pieces of ideas around for me just enough to help me stretch my thinking…I already have the kids writing online and commenting on each others’ posts. I work with them in conferences to help them with their writing, but why I haven’t engaged them online-yet? It’s time to put a few more pieces together.

Every day I read to the kids from a novel. They eat a snack and draw in a little stapled-together booklet of half-sheets of paper. All I ask of them is a picture of some kind and some text that summarizes the reading from that day. We stop and talk about the book. I use this time as an opportunity to think aloud about our reading-their response in the journal is a reading of the book also. They share their observations. I model the reading process, and we cover a lot of ground with the content, too.

Next Steps

So why haven’t I started writing this stuff down on our website??? I need to be there, too, for the kids. I didn’t want to use the site for classroom management, and I haven’t seen the appropriate mode of participation for me. I want my part to be literacy-focused, so today I entered my first blog post on Tell the Raven, our class site. I’m going to keep my teacher blog focused on my thinking about the books we’re reading. With it, I’ll model the kind of writing/thinking about books that I want them to do, and at the same time I’ll prompt them to do the same.

The kids will find my post, and I’m certain they will begin to comment on what I’ve written. I’ll encourage them to write their own observations of the books they/we read on their own pages, as well. This won’t be an assignment. It will be an invitation. I know it’s going to be a winner. It’s so simple.

Incidentally (a tangent here), Dave Weinberger has a site called Small Pieces Loosely Joined for Kids with an article called What the Web is For. I haven’t studied the article, but it looks appropriate for upper elementary-aged students.