The other day Mark Ahlness posted about his students spending silent reading periods reading blogs that my fourth graders wrote this year. It may interest people to hear a little bit about the production of those Pokemon blog posts and how my students used Wikipedia, especially since Doug Johnson posted a spirited and correct defense of student uses for Wikipedia. I’m glad Wikipedia isn’t blocked because it was a big help to all of us.

I’m out of touch with video game culture, and when a couple of my students started to write Pokemon stories, I had not a clue what they were about. I couldn’t help them with any of the proofreading, since I didn’t know how to spell things - and neither did they. One of them found some fan fiction sites that he really liked, and I hoped that maybe they’d get some pleasure out of reading what other fans wrote. I also hoped that a little quality would rub off, and that I could get them to do a little more exposition in their work for those of us who are neither fans nor clairvoyants. But that never really happened.

I finally got overwhelmed and a little disgusted with the whole business because they wrote these really long and complicated stories that made no sense to me, and I questioned what they were learning. I resented the time it took for me to help them work through the spelling and punctuation issues when we couldn’t even figure out how some of these game-world words, (and names like Cindiquil) should be spelled. I put restrictions on how many of these stories I was willing to help them publish because they required a LOT of one-on-one attention. I asked the kids to get help with the mechanics from people at home, but few did.

Finally one student hit upon the idea of looking somewhere else on the internet to find the correct spellings. Since the district blocks entertainment and game sites, and we couldn’t visit the game homepages from school, we used Wikipedia pages devoted to these games and stories with links to related pages. This turned into a pretty healthy resource for them, and they researched the correct spellings of the terms they were using in their work. They soon figured out how to link to the Wikipedia image files. Other students began using Wikipedia to read about tigers, and whales, and singers, and other stuff they wanted to find out more about, but Wikipedia proved to be an invaluable resource for those of us who needed help with esoteric proper nouns.

During what became a reading/writing period, I patrolled the room with a clipboard taking notes. I chatted with students about what they were looking for, and what they were learning, and if it was for a project, etc. When I could see that they weren’t focused, I’d give them an assignment. But for the motivated kids, I showed them how to take notes (on paper, to avoid the copy/paste reports they tried to write) and let them follow their interests.

When we got noticed in the local newspaper, I put the Statcounter code on one of the template files to track our visitors. I was amazed to see how many people visited the kids site. Lots more than read this blog, as a rule. And they generally find the site with Google searches for things like the strongest pokemon in sinnoh, or pokemon how to get to outer space. It seems that my fourth-graders created something there’s a demand for, even if I couldn’t appreciate or understand it. What do I know?

I think there’s a real problem finding elementary kid-level reading material on the internet. I’m glad my students provided a source for some of Mark’s readers, and anyone else who wants to read fourth grader writing, but I wish I could have helped them do a better job with their fiction writing. I simply don’t have the background knowledge to comment on the fan fiction, and I couldn’t convince any of them to consider writing for an audience that might need a little more help. I wanted the kids to know that folks were reading what they wrote, even if they didn’t leave comments, and I explained to them that Google was indexing their work. I showed one little girl what happened when we did this search, and she was thrilled to see that her blog was the top result.