Student Blogging Update

At the beginning of the school year, I posted about my plan for 8th-grade blogging.  Since we are now over halfway through the school year, I thought I'd post an update on how this experiment in public is going.

In short, it's going great.

You probably want a little more detail, huh?  Okay, I suppose that's legitimate.

First, let me say as a science teacher that good writing matters, no matter what class you are in.  Good writing matters no matter what career your plan to explore.  Good writing matters because clear communication matters in our world like it never has before.  Blogging has been a great opportunity for my 8th graders to practice writing.  In the beginning, they treated the blog a little more casually than I would have liked.  I got blog posts that started with "What up? This is yo boy KW here."  That gave me an opportunity to have the discussion about the difference between informal personal writing (like personal tweets) and more formal writing for the purpose of education.  This improved their posts dramatically.

Second, we live in a world where we rarely take the time to reflect.  We get a constant stream of input all day every day.  I read recently that the 2016 American brain processes more data in one week than the 1776 American processed in their entire life.  We form instant opinions that we actively refuse to change, even in the face of new input.  We are so busy taking in new information that we don't take the time to reflect and get perspective on the information we already have.  Blogging has been a wonderful opportunity for me to get perspective as an adult, and I am starting to see it in my students as well.  Their posts are a lot shorter than mine; they are only required to have five sentences.  Some of them are now showing deeper thought than they were before, and I think it is because they are "forced" to reflect at least enough to produce five good sentences.

Third, while this has not yet caught on with my fellow 8th-grade teachers as much as I would have liked, I have found that I can make the science blog as cross-curricular as I would like.  At the end of the first semester, I asked them to tell me their favorite thing they had learned so far.  By specifically not including the words "in science," I gave them the opportunity to tell me about any of their learning.  I got some lovely posts about math and history and books they were reading in English.  It was wonderful.  This week, their assigned topic is specifically about how their subject disciplines interact.  How are math and science and history and writing all related to each other?  They will have to consider this for more time than they would have if they weren't writing a blog post.

Lastly, I have discovered that student blogging can incorporate almost anything.  If I want them to realize that proper citations matter outside of English, I can require it on this week's blog post.  If I want them to reflect on how their study of science affects or reflects their faith, I can make that the topic of the week.  If I see a cool 60-minutes spot about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I can post a link and ask them to respond in their blog.  If I have a guest speaker, they can blog their response to him.  The blog can be used for project checkpoints and making sure they know how to make a working link.  Think of a skill you want your students to have, and you can incorporate it into their blog post requirements.  The best part is that I don't have to make a new assignment, overwhelming them with the amount of work they have to do.  The blog posts are due on Friday, no matter what; so it isn't an additional burden when I think of a new skill I want them to practice.

What I am most looking forward to is how this year's students progress with their blog.  The ultimate vision is that they will continue to update this blog throughout high school, place their best writing there, curate their own work, and have a digital portfolio that can use for college applications, job applications, and personal enrichment.  Since we are only half way through year one, it is probably to early to tell if this will have that kind of long-term impact.  So far, it is going quite well.