B. C. Digital Literacy
Student Blogs
Why share student blogs with the world? Student blogging is a great tool for supporting digital literacy where the student becomes the curator and author of their own educational experience. Students can develop their own network of knowledge nodes and contacts while experiencing exciting connections and global interactions that can ignite a passion for exchanging ideas with others and writing for authentic purposes.
Getting Started: Think about WHY you want to get involved in student blogging. A big question will be "who is the intended audience?" If your goal is to facilitate more dicussions with classmates or school mates in a private setting, you may wish to pursue wikis or other closed social platforms. These are great private online spaces that contribute to a positive sense of community and begin the conversations around digital etiquette. However, private spaces limit the conversation and exposure to broader audience interactions.
In British Columbia, you will require informed consent for students to participate in using online social tools.
A great launch activity for blogging is to ask students to create paper blogs - an idea shared by Pernille Ripp. This lesson will support students in learning more about writing for a public audience and the idea that comments can extend a digital conversation. After the paper blogs are written by the students, they are posted onto the student's lockers or desks. We leave them up for several days encouraging students and guests to read each and every blog post. Students are given a stack of sticky notes to write comments on the paper blogs. We read several online student blogs and comments and look for comments that create more dialogue. We called those comments "open" comments because they opened a discussion. "Closed" comments were comments that stopped a conversation or were difficult to reply to. Students were asked to write open comments, and "post" their sticky notes on the lockers with the blogs. Students were excited to be receiving comments and wanted to reply, so they learned about nesting their notes, or attaching their replies to the original comments so that the conversation could be read easily as a thread. The blogs were left up for about a week afterwards, and guests and students were welcome to continue commenting.
We discussed how the students might choose to use their blogs and what content they may want to include, such as images, stories, reflections or classroom assignments. It becomes a personal platform for learning and sharing out.
Student blogging can be a great tool to support the development of digital literacy in our students as their blogs grow into a personalized curation and creation space and a platform from which to spring into new conversations with other interested parties on topics that may not be traditionally emphasized in our schools. Blogging bridges the learning at home/learning at school divide by opening a window between the two spaces. Students can share their knowledge on a variety of topics that may not otherwise come up. Blogging will also enable more students to share their learning in a manner that connects closely with their learning process. If they learned something with Multimedia sources, it will be easy for students to not only credit these sources, but link out to share these resources for other interested learners. A student blog can be a place to share out useful sources of information and it can also be a place where students make sense of the information that they are curating. This can be a collaborative effort, where they filter, organize and make meaning of new information through their conversations and posts.
Some Considerations: You may wish to use a blogging platform that you can fully moderate. Kidblog is a popular choice for this purpose. Teachers can moderate both student posts and any posts made by the public. Some teachers choose to have their students create their own accounts and maintain full responsibility for their posts and comments. Whichever direction you choose to take, ensure that parents are informed, and that you actively continue to teach the skills of writing for a public audience throughout the year and the responsibilities of contributing content in a mindful way.