Finding new hope for research papers (and a new use for Diigo)

Guiding my students through the process of writing a research paper is part of the 8th grade curriculum.  Having done plenty of research writing myself, I value and respect the importance of the process.  But to be completely honest, I have never really enjoyed teaching it.

There always seemed to be something missing from the research papers students wrote in my class.    Even when students had complete control over what they researched, their writing just wasn’t meaningful. It was forced, mechanical, and impersonal.  Every year, I revised my both approach and the assignment, and while the changes I made to my practice usually yielded an improvement, they never affected what I had most hoped to change.  

I had just about accepted that research papers were lifeless, when a few weeks ago I tried out an idea for a project with my students that has given me new hope.  The project, a research paper, was a little different than anything I had done with my classes before, and I began it before I fully had my head around where it would go.   It combined a novel we had just finished, The Hunger Games, with a little brainstorming, some Diigo assisted web research, and a lot of writing.  The result was paradigm shifting.

Here was the idea for the project: Students would select and research a topic related to The Hunger Games, then use what they found through their research to write a paper that connected the novel and the topic.  It sounds simple, but of course, it wasn't.

In short, this is what we did:

I told my students we would be researching topics that related to the book.  As a class, we made a list of related topics that were researchable. Below is the list of what we brainstormed.

Students picked a topic and did a couple quick-writes in their daybook about what they knew already about the topic and how it tied in with the book.  

With their topics fresh in their minds, students turned to the Internet to search for more information.  I intentionally didn’t give much direction as to what they needed to find through their research.  Instead I just directed them to read-up on their topic, and while doing do, use Diigo to 1) highlight important information they found, and 2) attach sticky notes to the site that explained connections they found/realized between their topic and The Hunger Games.  For example, a student researching "relationships" may find a site giving information about healthy relationships and put on a sticky note on a fact that she/he felt explained a characteristic of Katniss and Peeta's relationship.   They took a couple days to find as much information as they could.

Next came the writing part (here's where it got really cool)

I told my students that they would be using what they found online to write a research paper.  The paper didn't have to be a particular number of paragraphs or have a particular organization.  What it had to do was show how their topic connected to The Hunger Games, bring in information from three sources (web sites), and give their reader a deeper understanding of both the novel and their topic (here is the full assignment that I posted for students). 

And this is also where my planning also started to fall apart.  I didn’t know what exactly a paper that did these things would look like.  So, my students and I figured it out together.

We brainstormed ways in which such a paper could be organized, and eventually decided that most would fall into one of the following categories:

• Use the topic researched to analyze something in the book (like with the relationships example above),
• Explain the facts behind the fiction (how real hovercrafts differ from those in the book)
• Show multiple connections between the topic and the book (how types of roman gladiators mirrored characters in the book).  

How kids decided to organize their paper depended on what they found in their research, particularly the connections they wrote on their sticky-notes. Fortunately, Diigo makes accessing these notes, as well as the content highlighted, pretty simple.



Screenshot taken from student's Diigo library



We made some rough outlines, and started writing.  The content I usually teach with research papers (quoting and paraphrasing, bibliography, citing sources) and essays (introductions, paragraph organization, conclusions) I back-loaded in through mini lessons and conferences while students were writing.  

Students published their projects (research papers) on their blog, we took a day to read and post comments on each others, talk about ones we thought were really cool, and complete a brief self-assessment of the experience (right).  Also, the rubric I used to grade the self assessment and project can be found here.  

Unlike the research papers that my students wrote in the past, these make for pretty interesting reads.  Below are some links to a few of them:

• For Liz's project, she analyzed and drew comparisons between poverty in the US and in Panem.

• Weston made some interesting comparisons between the Hunger Games and Jersey Shore in his piece. 
• Alycia used her research to write a post examining the science behind the genetic mutations featured in the Hunger Games
• Asia analyzes Katniss' relationships as well gives advice to anyone caught in a love triangle in this tip sheet.

• Jacob researched force fields, and wrote this post about figurative force fields that exist in the Hunger Games. 
• Luis wrote about his analysis of the wilderness survival techniques used by characters in the Hunger Games.
• David wrote this brief, but interesting, piece that compared Hunger Games characters to types of Roman Gladiators. 

Making sense of what worked

Earlier in this post, I called this experience “paradigm shifting” for me.  And it was.  I now look upon writing research papers more favorably. What made this experiences so different was that it treated my students like writers. The writing they did was the real type, not the scripted, certain-number-of-paragraphs, topic sentence-supporting details type. It put students in a position, where writers often are, of having to make a number of decisions based on the information they have and how they want to get it across.

It was hard, too.  I saw my students struggle a lot more through this process than any time we had written research papers in the past.  By not knowing myself what these papers would turn on out to be, when a student asked me for help, I wasn’t able to give them a quick answer.  Instead, we would end up having these long conversations about what they found through their research and what they were trying to make happen in their writing. There really wasn't much more I could/should do.  The eventual form this paper took was up to students, as writers, to figure out.

When the process was all said and done, the final product was amazing.  Not necessarily “amazing” in the sense that all of my students produced the greatest research papers ever written (though there were a few that were better than any produced in my classroom before). What made these papers so great was that they had life and personality. Their words had a voice of their own, not separate from the author who wrote them.  And all of them, even the ones that were a bit rough around the edges, clearly reflected a considerable amount of thought. These were papers written by students who were not just going through the motions.

This isn’t the last experience my students will have in my class with writing research papers; I never planned for it to be.  My intentions were for this assignment to be an introduction to the genre of research writing in the context of a creative activity that would also extend their thinking about a novel.  Later in the year, we will build off of the skills introduced here to write a more formal research paper. A paper that I'm going to be doing more thinking about before I begin taking my students through the process.  

I need to think through more this idea of formal writing.  In my mind I've kept it separate from creative writing (I even said above "an introduction to the genre of research writing in the context of a creative activity), but now this separation is seemingly less distinct.  Formal writing need not be formulaic, and creative writing need not be it's own, segregated genre apart from the more academic types.    I know this to be true now from my experiences with this project, seeing my students give life to writing that I had dismissed as hopelessly dead.  

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Say Something 2.0 (beta)

A couple weeks back my student teacher, Kim, was reading aloud to students from the novel, the Hunger Games, while students read aloud in their books.  Throughout reading, she would take short breaks, allowing students to participate in Say Something, a "during-reading" activity is exactly what its name describes. For it, students stop reading, turn to a partner, and say something about the text. The partner responds, then takes his or her turn saying something and getting a response. The entire process doesn't take more than a minute or two, after which students continue reading.

While I circulated the classroom during one of the Say Something sessions, I overheard multiple conversations that I thought were absolutely brilliant.  There were students making these incredibly insightful comments on what was happening in the story that had rarely spoke up in class. But just as I started thinking about how much I was liking this activity, it occurred to me that there was something that I did not like. Here were all of these great ideas about a text popping up around the room, but outside their own conversation, students didn't get to hear them. I was thinking about solutions that didn't necessarily involve a whole class discussion (which I love but would take away from the amount of time that doing Say Something allows to be spend actually reading), when my thoughts drifted back to an evening last week.....

I was sitting on my couch alone, family asleep, and was watching one of the Republican debates. Not after long, my interest began to fade, and I decided to check my Twitter account.  I noticed that a few of those I followed were tweeting about the debate, and curious, I decided to search Twitter for all debate-related tweets.  My engagement level began to shift almost immediately as I moved between the debate on television and the real time commentary in response to the politicians on the stage.  In some cases, the statements made on the tweets made me laugh out loud, others presented a perspectives I hadn't considered, and other tweets were so ridiculous that I was left with no choice but to tweet back to them.

It then occurred to me that my activity on Twitter was a lot like that of my students during Say Something--I and others commented to a common experience and shared responses in return.  But being able to carry out these interactions in a medium like Twitter (as opposed to the physical classroom), had some distinct advantages: I didn't have to wait my turn, I could comment at any time that I liked, and the size of the group with whom I interacted had no limits.

Seemed to me like moving the Say Something activity in my class to a digital space could make it a lot more productive and engaging. I couldn't wait to try it out.

Since Twitter is blocked in at my school, I set up a chat room in Today's Meet, and shared the link to it with my students on my website.  The instructions for this new version of the activity (yes, I did call it Say Something 2.0) were modified after my own experiences with Twitter.   I would play the audio version I had of The Hunger Games, while students would also read along in their books.  When students wanted to Say Something in response to what was happening in the book, they would type their comment into our chat room, where other students could then read it and respond, if they so chose.  Afterwards, students would refer the the transcript and write a brief reflection on their contributions and learning during the activity.

I had a feeling that this lesson was going to be awesome.  It was going to pull kids into a book in a way that just reading alone couldn't do.  They would extract levels of meaning from the text that they otherwise never would have known.  Even my most weak and reluctant readers would not want class to end.  Students may even want to applaud at the end of the lesson....like sometimes people do in the movie theater.

But looking back on it now, I guess I really shouldn't have been that surprised when the lesson crashed and burned shortly after it got off the ground first period.


After only reading a couple pages in the book, blank looks began to creep across my students faces.  Comments typed became less connected to the text.  No one was even attempting to follow along in the book.  And I, still clinging to the hope of what I thought this day would become, let the lesson continue until my students finally brought me back to reality.

One of my best students stood up and shouted, "I have no idea what's going on!"

"This book sucks!" another shouted.  Seeing others nod their head in agreement, I realized that class would not end today with a standing ovation.  I decided to cut our loses and salvage what I could.  We closed the computers, turned off the audio, and reread together as a class.

Seems that it's near impossible to follow along in a novel while typing comments and reading a string of others scrolling across a screen, even when that novel is being read aloud.

I chalked this up to a learning experience about kids, technology, and multi-tasking.  But my learning did not end at the realization that this was a failed lesson.  Actually, that's just where my learning restarted. 

When my second period class walked in, we tried the lesson again, but this time with one minor change: we didn't try to read the novel and write at the same time, so it was sort of structured like the no-tech version of Say Something.   I made a few other changes as the day progressed in response to what I saw happening with my students.  By my sixth period class, here's roughly what the lesson looked like, with my revisions written in bold:

1.    Students entered the class, logged on to their computers, signed in to the chat room.  Students needed to join the room using their real first name (having taught for this many years, I don't know why didn't foresee the need to make this one explicit from the start).
2. I reviewed the procedures for the Say Something activity we did the previous day, and explained how throughout or time reading today, we would stop and say something, but type our comments in the chat room, as well as respond to the ideas of others using the @ symbol and that person's name.  Commonly understood abbreviations or text-speak was fine, so long as the abbreviated words were school appropriate. 
3. While we read the story together, all computers were left closed.
4. At various places throughout the story, we would stop reading, open computers, and take 5 minutes or so to have a Say Something conversation about the text.  Students could refer back to what they had read in the text while participating in the conversation, but not read ahead.
5. After with about 10 minutes left in the class we would stop reading, and students would complete a self assessment/reflection of their reading, learning, and participation in the activity.  To do so, they would look back over the transcript of the conversation and complete this Google Form that I had posted to my class blog.

That's it.  The lesson took about an entire hour, and it rocked.  That change in format I made after first period made all the difference.  Being able to direct their attention on the novel, students understood it and were able to have a conversation in our Today's Meet room that was productive, and in many ways, transpired like I had initially hoped it would.  The online space for the discussion enabled multiple conversations to take place at once.  It was difficult to follow them all, but I remember at most points noticing the majority of my students to be involved in at least one strand at any given time. And when compared with our conversations in person, it did not seem like anything was lost on the depth of the ideas being shared.  Actually, it seemed like having students put ideas in text format (that they could spend more time with to process and return back to if needed), combined with the exposure to a wider ranges ideas shared and conversations to drop in on, deepened the level at which they experienced the novel. 

Discovering new possibilities

There was something else that I saw happen, something that I didn't expect, that also added an additional layer to this activity.  My students didn't want to do it silently....like I had directed them to do.  I figured that the reading and writing happening in our chat room would require students' full attention, so in my attempt to keep students from experiencing the type of information overload that afflicted my first period, I shushed the whispers I heard among students during our Say Something breaks. 

After a while, though, I began to notice that many of the comments I was trying to stifle were in fact tied to the conversation taking place on-line.  So, after trying in two classes to redirect students' verbal comments to the chat room ("talk with your fingers," I heard myself say), I decided to see what would happen in my last class if I just let them talk.  And what happened blew me away.

Sure enough, my sixth period began whispering to one another in response to what they were reading in the chat, and when I didn't make any move to stop the talking out, other students joined it.  It was as if the conversation just changed spaces, but after listening to it for a little while, I realized that there more going on than just a venue change. 

I noticed that some of the comments students saying out loud were weird.  Not weird like off-task or silly, but weird like disconnected.  One student would respond to another even though they didn't ask a question. Or someone would interject a comment that was insightful but completely unrelated to the topic conversation taking place.

It wasn't until that I looked down at my computer that I realized what was happening. The online conversation never stopped.  Students were still using this space to respond to others' ideas, both posted in the chat room and shared out loud. And the same thing was taking place in our physical class discussion.

I had never before thought about bringing such a hybrid-type conversation into my classroom.  But I really liked what I saw, and it's got me thinking.... 

I feel like physical class discussion and conversations carried out digitally (chat, disc forums) have their respective place in my classroom.  Each has their own strengths and weakness with respect to the exchange of ideas and student learning. But in these hybrid conversations that I saw unfold in my classroom when I let students chose the mode in which they expressed their ideas, students seemed to interact in both spaces simultaneously without much trouble; actually, this is where they gravitated to naturally. 

And from what I can tell, they benefited from the experience, with these benefits stemming from the advantages that were afforded through interacting in this unique hybrid environment. I saw students draw out deeper levels of meaning from the text from being exposed to a greater number of interpretations during the short bursts of interactions that the activity allowed.  All students seemed to be engaged.  The overly vocal ones got to say what they needed to, and those who were typically quiet or just had a hard time getting a word in, had an outlet for their ideas. 

I'm excited about what we stumbled accross, but I'm still processing it.


I'm wondering what it means that my students so naturally were able to carry out a conversation in two spaces at once.  I didn't set up the lesson like this; it was they who pulled it in that direction. One that I found to be incredibly surprising considering how much trouble students in my first period had when trying to follow along in a novel while also conversing online. I'm sure the complexity of the language used in the novel had something to do with it, but I'd bet that it is also, in part related, to their communication experiences outside of school.

I'm wondering what this means for my teaching. I've known that there are some communication differences between my students and I ever since I've seen the ease at which they can carry on a conversation with a few of their friends in-person while simultaneously texting others.  I couldn't do this to save my life. So on one hand, my experiences with our hybrid discussion may have been a lesson to me about engaging kids at their level.  But on the other, I keep thinking about this infographic I saw the other day on the decrease in brain activity scientists are finding in people who try to multitask, and it makes me wonder if encouraging such types of interactions would actually be a disservice to my students. 

So, I'm thinking now about what role, if any, such a hybrid conversation could play in my classroom.  What would a class discussion or Socratic Seminar look like if it was carried out in this manner?   Is this a step in the direction of 21st Century Learning? Or is is a step backward for the learners of today? 

Blogging to get myself blogging

I've always been better at starting than finishing.  In part because I can be scattered, but mostly because I like to bite off more than I can chew, trying to juggle so many tasks that I don't have time to really do any of them well.  I just do my best to keep from loosing grasp on too many of them at any given time.

Last year, when I decided to coach wrestling, I did so at the expense of writing to my blog.  For two months I didn't touch it. This year, in taking on coaching again, I made an agreement with myself that I wouldn't neglect my blog writing.

It wasn't easy, but I held myself to it.  The past two months, I ended up writing five posts, four of which I felt were worthy of being read.  I know, it doesn't sound like much, but I'm pretty proud of my accomplishment. I'd be even more proud, though, if I actually managed publish more than one of them.

With the wrestling season over and a little more free time on my hands, these three perfectly good starts, hiding out as drafts in my dashboard, are eating at me.   I'm not completely sure why these few unpublished posts are so unsettling.   I actually have more drafts than published posts.  It probably has something to do with the tremendous amount of effort that went into finding the time to write these past months.  

In any case, I'm going to make another agreement with myself.  By the end of next week, I'm going to get a couple of these posts finished, revised so they are at least partially intelligible, and published to this blog. 

This post is part of the process.  I know that if I say it and put it out there, I'll hold myself to it. And perhaps having this additional pressure will help me to resist the temptation I'm feeling right now...the one where I'd rather keep the post in draft form than hit that publish button.    

Hunger Games Blog-Out!

As I wrote about in my last post, my students and I have spent the majority of our learning time this year engaged with the Hunger Games. With the second half of the novel, students mainly spent class time either reading it, writing about it, or talking about it.  They kept an ongoing double entry journal in their daybook that they would write in each day, responding to events in the text as they read.

Every Thursday, students would build off of what they had written in their double-entry journals in an extended piece  published to their blogs during our weekly Hunger Games Blog-Out.  My requirement for the blog post was deliberately broad, so as not to stifle student creativity, ownership, and the opportunity writing with meaning. I only asked that students write blog posts that were thoughtful and focused primarily on their response to the text, rather than simply retelling what had happened.   I've linked a few of my student's posts here, here, and here.

Friday, for the second part of our Blog-Out, students would read and respond to the posts written by their classmates, writing comments that spoke back to the ideas of the author or other commenters about evens from the Hunger Games.  With about 15 minutes left on our commenting days, students would complete this brief reflection/self-assessment I made on a Google Form and posted to my classroom blog; it focused on both their writing and the ideas they encountered written by others.

We pretty much followed this routine of reading and writing, blogging-out and commenting for six weeks, as we read the second half of the Hunger Games. It went incredibly well, with students coming to look forward to both having the space and time to compose their thoughts, and receive responses from their classmates.

Browsing student blogs and  comments
 via Flipboard on a Friday Blog Out

This commenting time gave students the opportunity to learn and practice something that I always have trouble teaching....responding to writing.  The comments students left for each other spoke to the ideas within writing, not the writing itself.  Only rarely would a student leave a comment saying something like, "you need to add more detail," or "you misspelled a lot of words."  Because of the nature of the Blog-Out assignment, with it being response-based around a common text, it was natural for students to write comments that served to converse with others' ideas.   Honestly, I didn't foresee our blog commenting time having this affect, but I'm excited that it had.  It will definitely ease the creation of the larger-scale writing community we will be building as we enter into our writing workshop in the near future.

I also found that responding to each others ideas, Students' attitude toward writing changed dramatically over this time, as well.  Many of the posts written at first were minimal, clearly written to get over with.  But as the process progressed, students writing became more about clearly articulating a position with a clear audience in mind. Students were writing for their own purposes, rather than mine.  They began to see that their writing didn't have to be a certain way, that it was their thoughts and thinking that mattered and doing so they formed a deeper connection to and understanding of the book.

We finished the book and had discussions of it in students' reading groups.  The conversations went well, but this didn't feel like the right place to end the unit. From reading students blog posts and listening in on their conversations, it was clear that students had and/or were forming deeper understandings of events from the text.  They needed the opportunity to develop and share these ideas, and for it I designed a final project.  One that incorporated students' blogs and let them take their creativity beyond text alone.  One that empowered them to use digital tools to create something awesome.

I'll write about this final digital project and share some of my students' work in my next post.

Glogging into the School Year with Mixed Media Poetry Projects

The first real project that my students dive into combines poetry, writing, and multimedia composition through several minilessons and the website Glogster. The project takes about a week to complete, and within it students write, collaborate, use digital tools, and self assess.  It's an awesome project that is perfect for starting the year; it introduces students to each other and elements of my class that they will build upon throughout the year.

Writing

The writing component of this project serves both to introduce students to each other and enter into the writing process.  For it, we focus our attention on two poems that address different aspects of one's individual experience.  The first, Being 13 (author unknown, but I linked to it here) defines this difficult age through timeless experiences that many adolescents can relate, and Where I'm From by George Ella Lyon, where the speaker captures aspects of her past that were important in defining her present identity.

Over the course of a class period, we read the poems, do some focused freewriting in response to each, discuss, then spend a little time creating copy change poems where students model the author's structure and organization to create poetry of their own.  The lesson is a tight squeeze for into a one hour class, but it gives students an excellent experience with writing for different purposes as well as the start of two drafts and an aching hand.

When students return the next day, they freewrite in response to the following quote from Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers:

To improve your writing you don't need advice about what changes to make; you don't need theories of what is good or what is bad writing.  You need movies of people's minds as they read your words.

This writing invariably leads to discussion about their past experiences with learning writing in school, and it also leads in to the conversation about the importance of feedback for writers and the types of feedback that are most useful. I then introduce students to the concept of writing groups, and introduce them to theirs, whom with which they will have their first meeting today and will be working with throughout the school year. This first meeting, which consists of each writer reading their piece aloud and listing to the responses of group members, tends to be fairly short, and after students finish, we have a quick conversation about revision, and they spend what is left of the class time revising and developing one of their poems.

Glogging into Digital Writing

Glogster has established itself as a digital tool in most teachers' toolboxes, and as a result, my students need little overview about how to go about using it.  Once signed on, I instruct students that they will be creating a Glogster poster with their poem being primary focus.  I ask them to consider the mood of their poem, and to be deliberate about picking a both a wall for their poster and text box for their poem so that these visual texts build upon they mood their text creates.

We also review the idea of symbolism, and I ask them to make decisions about the graphics they include so that they in some way way symbolize the concepts that are expressing through their writing. After it appears that most students have these aspects of their poem well under way, I bring in another mini-lesson on using images and fair use, inviting them to include CC images in their digital poster as well.


As they take the better part of the class to type (and continue to revise) their poem and make selections about visual elements, I make sure to talk with as many students as I can about the decisions they are making.  I try to keep our conferences encouraging and positive, which this year has turned out to be incredibly easy.

After a couple days spent creating their digital posters, I introduced students to an additional layer they would use to add to the meaning the reader of their poem would experience: video.

Author Interviews

A neat feature of Glogster is its ability to grab a video and/or audio to be included on the poster directly from a computer's webcam and mic.  After introducing this feature and brainstorming a list of questions they could ask each other about their writing, students got back in their writing groups and took turns interviewing the author of each Glogster poster.  Each student included their interview on their poster, adding yet an additional layer of expression and type of media to their projects.

Sharing

Students embedded their completed Glogster poster into a post on their blogs, and after a brief conversation about leaving comments, visited the posts of their classmates to view their projects and leave feedback. I asked students to first visit and comment on the projects of those in their writing group, as they have privileged insight into the journey undertaken by the author of these projects.  Afterwards, they were free to visit and leave comments on any of their classmates' posts.


Assessment

Grading writing is always tricky.  On one hand, students should know what is expected from them and how they will be assessed.  On the other, using a rubric with set criteria neglects the differences that students bring with them to my class and emphasizes product over process.  Using standard criteria to assess a writing-based project can't begin to assess the thinking and learning that occurred through creating the project.

So for this project, and those that will come after it, I focused on assessing the important, but often unseen, aspects of this project the only way I know possible: by having them assess themselves.  I posted the directions to the self assessment here.

Reflecting on Reflection....



But also, as expected, there were quite a few students who were thrown off by the idea of assessing themselves.  For years, they've been given the message that learning is determined by the teacher, not them.  Some students, in their assessments expressed relief that I wasn't just judging their final product because it did not truly reflect all of the effort and hard work they had put into their writing and/or learning how to use Glogster.  There were others that quickly created sophisticated digital posters, who weren't able to say a whole lot about their writing or learning.   And there were also a handful of students who were angry that they had to assess their own learning, wanting instead for me to do it for them. 

Like or hate the concept of self assessment, my students will have plenty of opportunities to practice this sort of metacognition this year, and it's my hope that as we continue the process of writing and reflecting, that all of my students will feel more free to embrace the messy process of learning and the opportunity to reflect on the importance of what they have done.

Overall, this project turned out to be a terrific experience. Through carrying it out, I got to learn about this amazing new group of students, and the students got to learn about and connect with each other in ways they previously had not.  They got to compose through multiple mediums and experienced moving back and forth in their writing between physical and digital spaces, and they experienced the practice of writing to think and learn, as well as writing for publication for a public audience.

This project served an important role in building our new classroom community, and it set the tone for the writing we will be doing for the next 175 or so days together.  I'll be sure to keep posting about how that goes.

Below are a couple examples of projects by students who asked me to share them.  I'm sure they'd love to receive some feedback!

Callie's project, titled "Callie's Poem"
Justin's Project, titled "Being Me"
Megan's project, titled "Being Megan" 
David's project, titled "Being 13"
Katelynn's project, titled "Being Me"

Revisioned Student Blogging

*This post is a follow-up to two posts I wrote earlier in the year, Rethinking Student Blogging, For Real and Headfirst into Blogging.

It is also the extended version of a piece I wrote for the UNC Writing Project Newsletter.  Portions not included in the Newsletter article are written in bold.

When I was first presented with the idea of using blogs in the classroom, it was suggested that they be used as a way for students to respond to a question or text and the ideas of others. I set up a classroom blog, had my students use it as a space to respond to a story we read, and quickly decided that I wasn’t impressed.  Physical class discussions elicited greater depth and participation, and besides, there were better online venues for students to interact share.

Recently, however, something happened that has caused me to rethink the blog and its potential in my classroom.  I started blogging for myself.

I created my own blog where I write about what matters to me and enter into a conversation with others of the same interest.  I learn from these other bloggers and integrate their ideas into my own, composing my new knowledge in a digital space where writing is no longer constrained to a pencil and daybook, where the world is my audience.

How I have come to know blogging hardly resembles my initial conception of it, as a teacher-centered space for student response.  Real bloggers are engaged writers because they write about what is important to them, and knowing this helped me to understand that meaningful writing needed to exist at the heart of student blogging if it is to be successful.  

With this realization in mind, I decided this year that I would make a second attempt at using blogs in my classroom.   I've always had my students compose and share pieces of thier choosing in our writing workshop, and if meaningful writing was my goal, our existing workshop provided just the place to begin our journey into blogging.

Getting Set Up

In order for students to feel a sense of ownership of their blogs, I decided to have them each create their own (as opposed to creating a single class blog where each could contribute) on the educational blogging site, Edublogs.  While it wasn't my first choice because of the learning curve presented to new bloggers, Edublogs was free, provided plenty of options for composing and customizing, and had an incredibly simple sign-up process.  Within minutes, students created accounts, named their blogs, and were ready to start blogging.   

To give students access to the blogs of their classmates, I created this Google Form.  On it, students typed in their name and pasted the url of their blog.  I then shared the resulting spreadsheet on my website, were students could then be able to browse through their classmates (and those in other classes I teach) and access their individual blogs.

Becoming Bloggers

During class time that we devoted to writing workshop, I made sure to have computers on hand so that students could write their final drafts to their blog when they were ready.  Every two or three weeks students would publish a new piece to their blogs and also take time in class to read and post comments on the published posts of their classmates.  The process was fairly simple and on the surface wasn’t much different than how we did things before blogs.  What happened after we began these digital sharing sessions, though, was pretty exciting.

I noticed it on our first commenting day when a student turned around and told her friend about a post she read that was really good.  After she made this comment, I noticed that student in earshot was reading the piece the student mentioned.  By the time I got to my computer and read it, seven students had posted comments.  By the time the author arrived to my class (the last of the day), 25 comments had been posted on it.  She came in the next day with the sequel to that post in hand, and her enthusiasm for writing has only grown since.  And she was just the first.

As we continued to blog, so did this trend of students talking during class and in the hall about student writing.  Students gained reputations for their writing, and networks began to emerge both in our school and beyond.  They established their identities and started thinking like writers, borrowing ideas from the posts of others and viewing the events that unfolded in their lives and in the world as new topics to write about.  They jotted down notes in their daybooks and freewrote with purpose. Revision was taken seriously, and proofreading gained a new significance.  

In years past, I've observed my students growing in such ways as writers over the course of the year through writer's workshop,  but the scale at which this growth took place this year was unlike anything I had seen before, and I'm confident that blogging had a lot to do with it.  Sure, I am a better teacher of writing this year thanks to participating in SI last summer (shout out UNCC Writing Project!), and without question my students' experience would not have been near as powerful it were not for my improved practice.   That being said, writing as bloggers afforded my students opportunities not avaliable to writers in physical spaces alone. 

Blogging gave students a chance to do more than tack their final drafts to the classroom wall.  It broke down these walls, and entered students into a new type of writing community, one where their words could be read by anyone at any time, where their ideas were widely received and could be disseminated instantly, and most importantly, one where they were able to feel that writing about what mattered, mattered.

Blogs as Digital Daybooks

As students became more familiar with writing in these digital spaces, it wasn't just their attitudes that changed.  The role of their blogs evolved as well.   Rather than only using them to publish final drafts, students would use their blogs to jot down ideas and start new pieces with the “save as a draft” feature.  Sometimes they would abandon drafts and began new ones.  And other times they would return to the ones they’d abandoned.   By the end of the year, students’ blogs functioned much like their daybooks, and many found a balance between working through ideas in both spaces.  

Growing into Digital Writers

The types of writing that students were doing changed, too.  Blogs provided students the opportunity to add new depth to their writing through integrating various digital elements.  Of course, this didn’t happen all at once.  Along with those I typically do on craft and mechanics,  I also led mini-lessons on different digital composition tools, many times learning right along with students. 

By the end of the year, they became quite good, too, at drawing upon digital tools to compose ideas beyond words alone.  Within their pieces, students included hyperlinks to outside web pages, past posts, and the posts of others; they  inserted Creative Commons images, videos, and music within their writing; and they also embedded digital projects they created themselves like podcasts, slideshows, animations, and comics.  Listed below are a few examples.  I'm sure they'd welcome any feedback that you'd like to leave!

• After writing this poem, Carol retold it in this post using only images that she created using Pixton
• Juan created this comic retelling a scene from our team's canoe trip, using Toondoo.  Pierre, his canoe partner told his version of the event with this animation he created with xtranorml.  Will, who did not go on the trip, created this animation with Goanimate to explain how the day went for those who stayed back with the substitute.
• Heather created this book using Storybird, which was inspired by previous posts she had written.  Check out her blog here and see if you can notice the recurring theme of her writing :)
• Allison created and embedded this 3D pop-up book about her experiences in 8th grade using Zooburst
• Lorenzo embedded a video slideshow that he created on Animoto into a post he wrote about child abuse.
• Shaytania and Katelyn wrote this poem on a relationship told from perspectives of both people in it.  Along with the text, they also recorded themselves reading their poem, which they posted as a podcast created using Audioboo.
• Ta-Layza wrote a rap about what she had learned about gymnastics and recorded it using Audioboo.  She posted her performance of it here.
• Erin created the Alice Jacob fictional series.  With each chapter, she gave readers links to other pieces in her series.
• Belen wrote this piece on her favorite music, where she included multiple links to related pages and sites to listen to the songs.

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