Blogs Taking a Seat In, Out of Classrooms

By David Sharos, Chicago Tribune

3/13/06

It wasn't that long ago that classroom instruction centered on teachers, desks, a chalkboard, and maybe a few crayons and markers.

Today, students work at wireless computer terminals, construct PowerPoint presentations, film and edit videos, and receive assignments through Blackboard course management software.

But if you want to interact with classmates in the early morning hours about a current topic, or get connected with an author thousands of miles away from your school, you log on and blog.

A blog, or Web log, is an interactive tool used to post comments and opinions on the Web. It represents what some educators feel is an untapped resource that will allow students to connect more with their teachers and peers as well as with the unlimited resources of cyberspace.

Blogs are a part of an evolving technology that began 20 years ago, says David Warlick, a Raleigh, N.C.-based consultant and founder of the Landmark Project, a professional development and innovations firm that promotes education reform. "I don't see `blogging' as a fad; it's part of what learning is right now," Warlick said. "I see this as something that started back in the 1980s when kids wrote programs in Basic, then discovered word processors, then e-mail and then Web pages. It's a way of communicating to a real audience and putting ideas out there in a polished way."

Blogs are relatively easy to set up and are user-friendly, making them effective tools even for teachers with kindergarten students. Often in educational settings, a teacher will use the blog as a venue for posting assignments or comments to the class and inviting students to share their own ideas.

Warlick said he first heard of blogging as an educational tool at a National Education Computer Conference held in New Orleans in 2004. There, high school journalism teacher Will Richardson spoke about blogs and his development of Weblogg-ed.com, a site dedicated to the use of Web logs, audiocasts and related technologies for students K-12.

Richardson calls blogs, "a powerful learning tool that students gravitate toward, initially, because of their social aspect."

"Kids begin talking with their friends, but if they are guided right, they'll begin to explore ideas and make this part of the learning process," he said.

Annette Lamb of Indiana University, a nationally recognized speaker who also works as an independent consultant with educators on integrating technology into the K-12 classroom, said blogs have been around since the late 1990s, and have increasingly drawn the interest of teachers since 2001.

"At first the interest was focused primarily on concerns about the reliability of information found in blogs and whether students would be mislead by inaccuracies and bias," Lamb said. "The past couple years, the main concerns have shifted to the activities of students. At conferences, I've heard teachers express concerns about how much personal information students are sharing about themselves. Just browsing student blogs, teachers can see how late into the night their students are socializing with their friends."

Blog growth is staggering. According to Richardson's Web site, the "growth of the blogosphere" tracked by Technorati, a search engine for blog sites, shows there are more than 27.2 million blogs and that the size is doubling every 20 to 25 weeks. Web logs are created every second of every day.

Scott Weidig, technology coordinator for Palatine High School District 211, believes educational blogs are being embraced "by the ends of the spectrum."

"You have the `geeks' who know about it and use it to create a dialogue, and there are others that see it as a sort of `underground' newspaper," Weidig said. "It's a way to voice opinions, and it's quickly evolving into this national craze."

Weidig defines blogs as "Web-based, online journal diaries," but Warlick and others feel that description is far too limiting.

"There is a lot more `distance learning' going on today, from e-mail to Blackboard programs, and kids are a lot more at home with technology," Warlick said. "Blogs can be a platform where kids' work gets done; things can be submitted, peer-reviewed, and students' work becomes part of a `community' of submissions. Blogs offer a much wider scope, and we've still not stretched all the possibilities."

Lamb says blogs are a "natural tool" that can promote life-long learning. "Young adults are asked to critique news blogs, explore global perspectives, and discuss issues of privacy and censorship."

Warlick says elementary school teachers like Cindy Newton of Connersville, Ind., are more likely to embrace blogs because teachers of younger students "show more flexibility and are more likely to experiment and are less lecture-driven."

Newton says blogging has allowed her students to expand their world.

"There is a scientist and environmental children's author living on an island near Washington State named Ron Hirschi who sent us a piece of sea creature in a box with clues to help my 1st graders identify what it was," Newton said. "We blog back and forth with him, and my kids sent him things with clues to see if he could identify them."

At the high school level, Frances Harris, a librarian at the University Laboratory High School in Urbana, says the blog site at her school allows students to comment and interact with the student newspaper.

"We put the school paper online about a month ago, and the kids are posting blogs now and are really into it," said Harris, who also has written a book, "I Found It on the Internet."

"Blogging is a viable educational tool, but teachers and librarians like me need to teach students how to use it," Harris said.

Newton said interest in the "secret creature" project has grown so much that a school in Australia wants to join the blog with the 1st graders from Eastview Elementary School. She's also excited about her students learning words well beyond their years.

"My students are now talking about `invertebrates' and `mollusks,' things most 6- and 7-year-olds don't understand," she said. "Over 62 percent of the kids at our school are on free or reduced lunch. A lot of them have never seen the ocean. One of them sent Ron [Hirschi] a blog saying, `Thank you for sending us the sea in a box.'"

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School yourself on educational Web logs

With more than 27 million blogs posted on the Internet, students can discover plenty of places to share information and network with others. Will Richardson, a nationally recognized expert in the field of educational blogs, recommends the following list.

Educators/ bloggers:

tim.lauer.name

mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging

www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm

www.speedofcreativity.org

Want to start a blog? Here are some places to start:

Edublogs.org

Blogger.com

21publish.com

If you're looking for software to set up your own blog, the following are recommended:

wordpress.org

www.haranbanjo.com/kidsblog

Check out a full list of blog options at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog