Tech T@lk
with Students Nowadays it seems like everyone has a blog. There are mommy bloggers, political bloggers, teacher bloggers, Disney bloggers…the list goes on and on. The group no longer left off the list of bloggers are students. In Mauri Dufour’s class at Fairview Elementary in Auburn students as young as five are eager to type away and share their writing with the world. Dufour uses Kidblog.org to encourage students to write and learn instead of using picture prompts like she was taught 15 years ago in college. Below, in Dufour’s words, are her three reasons to encourage student blogging.
Authentic Audience When students blog, they’re not just writing for me they’re expanding beyond the four walls of the classroom they can reach out to anyone around the world and share their stories and ideas. The Superintendent responds, other teachers in the building, and parents all respond. They go home and ask to use their parent’s computers or iPads and they ask to read their friends writing and then respond to them. The blogs make them want to write more on their own time and respond to their friends’ writing. Author Jan Brett even responded to almost all the kids’ questions about the book they were reading that they wrote about in their blogs.
Feedback Once their words are posted online their writing is public. For my students, they get to read and see what kids outside of our classroom are learning. The students’ world is expanded with our blog—there is an opportunity for anyone in the world who is willing to log on and see your work. I sent out a couple of tweets and emails and asked people to respond to my students’ blogs. The next day people were coming in and responding to them, and you should have seen how happy they were they had responses. The kids that didn’t have responses got up and said I’m going to do better today…so it turned into more than just sharing our experiences, but how am I going to improve to make people understand my writing.
School-Home Connection—Parent Connections The blog is something their parents can see and understand what they’re doing—students are sharing and they’re learning. With the blog parents get a glimpse into the classroom. The parents can see—this is what my kid is able to do—this is their work. It’s a glimpse into what they’re learning. It’s not just information they would get in a parent newsletter, but the blog is from the kids’ perspectives, through their eyes. The blog becomes a portfolio for the students and parents can see their writing from the beginning of the year and then the progress to the end of the year. This is in a permanent place where you can see what you’ve done and where you’ve been.
To see Dufour’s class blog, which has built-in protections for student privacy log on to: https://kidblog.org/class/mrs-dufour/posts February 2016 • www.maineea.org
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