I: Accountability
I know, another teacher writing about student blogs?
It’s true that edtech folks have been praising the power of
blogs for students for several years, Michael
Drennan’s excellent work and Susan
Davis’s justifications not least among them. Many colleges now require their students to
keep blogs of their coursework
or experiences and have so for
years. It’s easy enough to find
tools for creating them, like KidBlog or
EduBlogs, planning
for them, or even assessing them: Tim
Horgan’s rubric is excellent and Mark
Sample’s simple approach is effective. More, there are plenty of contests
and scholarships
available for students who blog well.
So why write more? A
few reasons: I want to offer my
reflection on student writing and accountability; I want to emphasize the fifth
stage of the writing process and its implications; I wish to explore the
neglected topic of blog promotion; and I want to relate some of my experiences
with writing transformations through blog writing.
In brief, though, I see no reason to ever abandon the process
of student blogs (though I will explore vlogging in the future!).
Accountability
As blogs are publicly published works by students, the stakes
for everyone involved in the writing process (instructor included) go up. Gone are the days when a paper was quietly
turned in at a desk and just as quietly returned privately several periods
later. The teacher and student shared a
powerful or shameful or forgettable experience of writing and no one ever knew
more; and this happened throughout the year with hundreds of students.
Now, however, the student knows that her writing will be read
by people more important to her than a mere teacher: family and friends and,
worse, strangers will see her words and ideas and even have the chance to
comment or rate the work! As a
consequence, the writing itself becomes more focused and thoughtful. Ever have those papers where you think, “Gosh,
if he had just spent one more round of revision and proofreading, this could be
solid work?” 90% of them? Me, too. While that will never go away entirely, the
student blogs I read seldom are fraught with simple errors.
A Process Note: I should
mention here that my student blogs are always the final stage of the writing process.
Students have already taken their work through 2-3 drafts through online peer
review and classroom workshops. Once the students have scored their peer’s work
as 80% or better, we call the paper “Publishable” and therefore ready to be
posted. If it scores lower, they continue to revise until it reaches that
stage.
As important, the student blog is a measure of accountability
for the instructor, as well. What is the
quality of work being produced in our classrooms? The blog demands that we are seen by other
students, by our colleagues, by our administrators, by the parents, and even by
a broader sometimes-critical public as credible producers of literacy.
(Equally, parents can see clearly when/what their child is not producing!) This level of transparency was never before
available (or even desirable) in earlier generations of my teaching career.
This implies too, then, that teachers have demonstrable
evidence for administrative evaluations of their work as producers of authentic
learning. In my own case, I am measuring
student growth across a year of blog posts. (Do Selma’s March posts show marked
improvement over those from October? I have all of them before me to see.) Am I seeing a collective class-wide
improvement in rubric scores across time?
Do I have evidence of student composition literacy? Do I have evidence of students employing
technology? Of course.
A Process Note: As students
employ the same writing rubrics across the year and are using the same rubric
as I am for peer evaluation, quantifying these changes is easier. I can keep track of these scores through a
gradebook, but students can also track their own progress by graphing their
scores.
Additionally, I should point out
that one of the four blogs I maintain is purely of teacher-written models of
writing for each assignment. Therefore I
model appropriate blog etiquette for students, that the process is real, that
the assignments are credible, and (often enough) what a solid piece of writing
looks like. I also post links to other
student-written works which are solid.
Accountability or transparency in our work is a worthy goal,
and one teachers need not fear if we see it as a process towards improving our
craft and student literacy and not merely a place of judgment or criticism. But it’s also notable—for me, anyway—that any
trepidation we might feel in engaging public projects like these is similar to (but
probably more limited than) the anxiety felt by students in doing so.
And empathy is a quality of good teaching.
- - -
A few sample student blog entries
from this year’s junior classes:
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