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This tweet linked to a blog post on Edutopia. The blog post was one teacher's experience using blogs to encourage students to write. Most of the students in Mr. Schwartz's 4th grade class are English language learners. He identified five challenges to having students blog: increasing parent engagement, internet safety, keeping students engaged, instilling 21st century skills, and building confidence. His experience was extremely positive, where students who had been reluctant to write became enthusiastic daily bloggers. An important part of the experience was that most all of the students were blogging, so they were responding to one another. Responding to what other people had blogged and seeing how many people read their blog posts encouraged students to keep writting. As you can see from the list of challenges, the blogging became about more than just writting, but tied into a lot of important issues.
One thing that concerns me about using technology like this in the classroom is students who do not have access to computers and the internet at home. However, Mr. Schwartz found that most of his students from disadvantaged backgrounds did have computers and internet at home. Also, he incorporated the blogging into class time.
There are two great ways I see to incorporate student blogging into my science classes. The first is to have students post their lab reports on their blogs. The prompt would be for students to put the scientific language of their lab reports into every day language to share with the general public. This is one of those high-on-Bloom's-taxonomy tasks that requires students to really understand the content. The second is to have students write responses to current events in science. Overall, I see blogging in the classroom as a way to make science more engaging and encouraging writting, and I'm excited to try it.
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