Using Blogs in the Classroom

(for @= references see http://digitalwriting.pbwiki.com)

As we noted with the example of Kathleen’s blog in Chapter 1, composition teachers have increasingly turned to blogs to foster writing in their composition courses. Anne Beaton of Robbinsdale Armstrong High School, Robbinsdale, Minnesota, shares her experience of integrating a blog) into her 11th grade AP composition class: http://beatonenglish.blogspot.com/

    I use the blog in my Advanced Placement English 11 course at Robbinsdale Armstrong High School, which prepares juniors to take the AP Language and Composition exam. We spend the majority of our time looking at the way in which something was written, focusing on the rhetorical devices and strategies employed by the author in addition to audience, tone, and purpose. Students read an assortment of non-fiction texts and write a fair amount of papers as they transition from learning the material, to identifying the material in professional writing, to incorporating the material into their own writing. Additionally, students practice for the exam by taking sample AP writes and multiple choice tests from previous years.

For me, a blog is not about the bells and whistles. I have snooped around the web enough to realize that my blog is very basic – I have not even filled in my personal profile. What matters to me is that I have created a space outside of my classroom where my students can look more carefully at an issue from class, discuss a text, or (their favorite) chat with one another while writing a paper.

Once school started, I had high hopes that I would make the blog an integral part of my curriculum; it might be a place to post weekly homework discussions, or a method to get my students to beef up their vocabulary. I had yet to discover what form the blog would take in my class. What I did not expect, is that the blog only truly became a part of the class once my students took ownership of the space.

Initially, I set up the blog as a way to help students learn a new concept I was introducing in class. I marched everyone into the computer lab to view the site where they were greeted with an assignment about connotation and denotation – complete with a description, steps to follow, and a link. I instructed each student to post a comment to the thread and read their classmates’ posts. My first venture was a success; however I felt that my students were essentially experiencing a typical classroom task via a blog – an electronic substitute.

    I tried next to supplement student learning by opening a thread and requiring that students post their favorite new vocabulary word. As with my first thread, each student only posted once. There was no real reason to engage in any sort of dialogue. My students were only doing what was required of them and the blog seemed contrived and was not enriching their learning experience in the least.

At winter break, I sent my students home with Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and I opened up one more thread encouraging students to post any questions they had about the book as they were reading. Posting on the blog was optional, and by the end of winter break, there were five—including two of my own. After such a weak response, I was ready to sever all ties with my blog for good, but I kept the thread alive by explaining to my students that if they were interested they could post any questions they had while writing their Spirit essays over the weekend. I mentioned that I would check in occasionally to help with any answers.

    By the following Monday, there were 29 posts—eight of them mine. With the first draft of their paper due the next day, I reminded students about the blog and suggested that (if interested) they jump into the discourse. Late that night I checked in on the blog and was floored to read that there were 154 posts! I scrolled through and read with fascination a record of my students’ activity as they questioned, answered, griped, empathized and commiserated, all while constructing an understanding of their paper topics. The thread narrates an evening during which students demonstrated a collective grasp of the material and a genuine care towards fellow classmates.

Some posted comments directly related to the rhetorical devices we had been studying in class and were met with an immediate and careful reply:

So I'm noticing that Fadiman uses a lot more parallel structure when she's talking about the Hmong history. Any ideas on what effect this has? By James, at 5:52 PM 

james: i think the use of parallel structure when talking about Hmong history emphasizes the fact that everything to the Hmong is connected. example: if ur sick, the cause may be because of something you did in this life or a past life. to them, every action means something and it makes sense to use parallel structure to get that across. thats just my thoughts.

have you seen any examples of Fadiman's voice when looking at Hmong history? : ) By anna, at 5:58 PM

Later into the evening, weary students spurred each other to write all the way through to the four-page requirement. Their verbal sparring offered others a humorous break:

Thanks, Elliot. As for you, you've got the easy modes. Unless you've squeezed dry every single aspect of each and every point you've made in your paper, you should still be able to add more, (more examples from the text, more elaboration on points that haven't been beaten to death, or a more thorough intro/conclusion). Joe 8:28 pm

Trust me joe, many ideas have been beaten dead, looked over, and severley beaten again, just in case. It's just that I'm trying to focus in on the main purpose of the novel (depicting cultural collision...i hope) and not run off on the smaller points. Elliot 8:33 pm

ok joe and elliot...ur comments are so funny....when ever i start hating this paper i just come look at them and laugh! keep up the good work! By anna, at 8:42 PM 

It appeared that once blogging was no longer an assignment, the blog itself created a sense of community where students were free to exchange ideas and anxieties, protest and receive feedback without fear of reprisal or a lower grade. The scholarly (and sometimes wacky) exchange convinced me to continue to incorporate the use of blogs in my curriculum.

When I first thought to use a blog in my classroom, I had hoped to create a space where my students could interact beyond our four walls. After some trial and error, I have stumbled upon a method of blogging that works for this group of students. Most recently, one student requested that I start a new thread for their upcoming synthesis paper. I have, and as of 10:00 pm tonight with our first draft due tomorrow, there have been 45 posts – none of them mine. Rather than require all students to artificially post and respond, it has worked best to offer a blog as a resource to those who seek further interaction with their classmates.

So Why Employ Blogging in Your Classes?

    We believe that blogging serves a primary role in improving students’ writing by providing them with a social purpose for writing to specific audiences within a classroom community. Rather than treating blogging an a mandated task, Anne believes that students began to value how they can use blogging to assist each other in their work.  She notes that use of “created a sense of community where students were free to exchange ideas and anxieties, protest and receive feedback without fear of reprisal or a lower grade.”  The students were engaged with posting to their blogs because they enjoyed sharing their ideas in ways that went beyond simply fulfilling a writing assignment. They shared tentative responses to their reading. They sought out advice from each other on how to write their papers.  They provided encouragement to each other. 

All of this is similar to online chat in that students were quickly responding to

each other’s posts.  However, it differs from conversational online chat in that in creating posts, students are formulating more extended positions in crafting their posts.

Student Engagement with Blogging

    Anne’s students as well as Kathleen’s students are engaged with blogging for a number of reasons.

Connecting with specific audiences.  Blogging is often associated with journalists, pundits, and political candidates’ uses of blogs to comment about political or social events, as well as engage community journalism in (@ = News blogs).  However, most people use blogs to record their personal experiences to an audience of their friends and family. A study by Universal McCann (2006) found that for young people, the most popular blogs were those of written for family and friends, followed by personal diary blogs, news blogs, photos blogs, and film/music blogs.  In another study of 135 college student bloggers at the University of Minnesota, most students kept blogs primarily as a tool for keeping in touch with peers on campus or family members (Scaletta, 2006). When asked to indicate how often the post entries on certain topics, the top three topics were “information about your day-to-day life,” “thoughts and reflections on your academic or professional interests,” and “venting of strong feelings or emotions” (p. 25).

     Blogging allows students to connect with specific audiences. In using blogs to describe a classroom’s experience in going on a kayak trip, an 8th grade student in Kathleen Gilroy’s (2005) class noted that:

Blogging has really helped me to connect with my audience and especially myself. It helped me connect with my audience by showing me how to really express myself when I'm talking about my personal feelings and also how to give proper instructions. It was like presenting to the audience directly. I had to have everything on point but still try to make everything sound good and fun. I really tried to put myself in their shoes. I wanted people to learn a lot from my instructional blogs. This opportunity felt and was amazing. Having perhaps hundreds or thousands of people reading and actually caring about what we did and how much we accomplished is overwhelming.

Students can also connect with world-wide audiences. In The World is Flat blog

project, students in Georgia and Bangladesh, shared their work used the blog, The Georgia-NJ Connection (weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/georgia) to work collaboratively on researching topics. And, in studying the book, The Secret Life of Bees, students at Hunterdon High School in New Jersey shared with responses to the book with the book’s author, Sue Monk Kidd (weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/beesbook).  Sharon McDermott of Northfield Community School, Northfield, Minnesota, created a book club blog (www.ncs-nj.org/blogs/bookclub) to foster responses to books that enhanced their classroom discussions. And, students at Urbana High School, Urbana, Illinois, share their online responses on a blog (uhsbookclub.blogspot.com) as part of their book club meetings in the school library.

Adopting different voices.  Students often prefer blogging to writing traditional papers because they can express themselves in a more natural, conversational voice associated with communicating with their peers (Watrall & Ellison, 2006).  In reflecting on her students’ uses of blogs described in Chapter 1, Kathleen noted that her students’ were expressing their responses to literature as part of conversing with peers:

I found that students come to see through their blogs that their individual responses to class texts matter and are worthy of an audience of peers. As such, they’re written in language that is meant to appeal to that audience, peppered with sarcasm, pop-culture references, and abbreviations that invite age-mates in. I found that blogs are a safe virtual space to bring students “outside” identities and literacies into the classroom.

Dana Boyd (2006a) uses the metaphor of the soapbox speaker in a community square to describe the process of adopting a public voice. She quotes one blogger, Jennifer, who noted that:

You're basically standing on a soapbox and reading something out loud only with a blog it feels like there's a big community square and everyone's got a soapbox and they're about the same height and everyone's reading at the same time. So it's a matter of people going and listening to one and oh, I don't like what you're saying and blogging with someone else and listening to what they're saying until you happen to find someone who is saying something interesting or you happen to know where your friend is on his soapbox saying something” (p. 3).

Boyd notes that Jennifer perceives herself as “speaking, performing her thoughts

to a conceptualized audience.” (p. 3).   By having your students reflect on how voice is expressed in their own or other blogs, students may understand how adopting certain voices serves to define their persona as writers (For an activity on analyzing voice in literature and in student blogs: @ = Chris Polley’s activity on voice).

Students can also create fictional blogs in which they adopt characters’ voices in constructing an ongoing narrative across different posts. Angela Thomas (2006) describes different types of fictional blogs: a series of posts in narrative sequence, blogs that employ a lot of hyperlinks and blog features to create a narrative, use of blogs to tell a partial story linked to fan fiction sites, role-playing blogs, character diary blogs, or blogs uses for publishing literary texts or for commercial purposes. Consistent with the idea of the serial novel, one popular type of fictional blog consists of diary accounts of one or more protagonists containing extensive links to other posts or sites. When readers provide comments, the writer then uses material from these comments in later episodes. As part of their creative writing, students could create their own fictional blogs based on a character’s recounting of fictional events. (@ = Fictional blogs).

         Classroom or school blogs serve as platforms for letting students voice their perspectives to their peers about school events.  Students as Albany High School in New York (blogs.timesunion.com/albanyhigh) and Berkeley High School, Berkeley, California (http://www.berkeleyhigh.org) created blogs to provide their own student perspectives on school events.

Producing attractive texts.  Students also find blogging engaging because they can use templates and other design features to readily create attractive, polished layouts associated with a professional, magazine-like appearance. They may then be more concerned about editing their use of font, color, images, and language than if they were simply creating a Word document.

Multimodal use of images and video clips.  Students also like the fact that they can easily embed images or video clips into their posts, images and clips illustrate their ideas.  If students are writing about traffic problems in their town, they can include digital photos or video clips of traffic jams in certain intersections, images or clips that function rhetorically to make their case for dealing with these traffic jams.  This use of images is evident in what are known as photologs such as Fololog.com (@ = Photologs). 

The ability to embed images and video clips is particularly useful in studying media, for example, analyzing advertising images. In his media course at the University of Minnesota, Beach had students create their own individual blogs using Blogger.  Students were given specific assignments to analyze use of film technique, examples of media representations of race, class, gender, and age; film and television genres; advertising images; news; and documentaries. In creating their blog posts, the students imported images and links to video clips of the media texts they were analyzing, allowing them to directly comments on these images and clips in their posts. Students then shared their blogs with the class by posting them on the class wikibook: teachingmedialiteracy.pbwiki.com/MediaLiteracyWikibook (for examples of his students’ blogs, see Student Blogs on this wikibook).

         Connecting with other blog posts within a classroom community and the larger blogosphere.  A key feature of blog posts is that they are highly linked to other posts.

Rebecca Blood (2002) notes that bloggers rely heavily on others’ blogs to construct their knowledge. They scour other blogs on their particular topics and/or check on feeds to their blog. They then filter what they find to extract the most relevant, valid information. They then post their findings by linking to other’s posts.

        This process of scouring, filtering, and linking reflects how blogs are constructed within the context of the classroom or larger blogosphere in which posts and comments are linked together as a vast network of cross-referenced texts related to specific topics.  These topics are organized according to tags or keywords that are listed at the bottom of posts that students can search for posts related to specific tags or keywords.

         Blogs are also linked through the use of RSS feeds.  By linking to their peers’ posts, as well as posts from outside the classroom, students are learning to formulate their ideas within the nexus of a range of competing positions that are linked together, as if they are at a large, noisy party in which they have access to all of the conversations going on simultaneously in the room.  Bud Hunt (2007) argues that rather than simply put their writing onto blogs, by linking to other posts, students are using blogs as a tool for drawing on and interacting with others within the context of a blogging community (Hunt, 2007). From reading and responding to each other’s posts, students learn to formulate their positions and develop convincing evidence to support those positions.

         Receiving comments to their writing. Students also like the fact that they can receive comments from other students in the class. In her use of blogs, Jean Burgess (2006) found that students who were most socially active in terms of social engagement in the classroom were also the students who were most likely to post comments or create blog links.  To insure that students receive comments from their peers, Beach has students serve as “blog partners” who are required to provide comments to their partner. 

          Storing students’ writing.  Blogs also serve as a useful way to organize writing as a “filing cabinet” (Richardson, 2006, p. 22) to store students’ writing in one place organized by time or topic, something that can then be used for portfolio reflection about student work. This means that you no longer need to be concerned about students submitting or losing paper copies of their writing.

Selecting a Blog Platform

    The first step in using blogs in your classroom involves selecting a blog platform from the many available options, for example, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Movable Type, Manila, SquareSpace, Radio Userland, DiaryLand, or Xanga (@ = Blogging platforms). (There are also books for teachers that describe the use of these specific blog platforms, for example, Brad Hill’s (2006), Blogging for Dummies, that contrasts different blogging platforms (@ = Books on blogging)). 

SIDEBAR

Alternative Blogging Sites

Blogger is only one of many different blog-hosting platforms (@ = blogging platforms). In deciding on which site is most appropriate for your classroom or school, you may want to experiment with different blogs given your needs related to ease-of-use for younger students, support, and safety features. In addition to popular sites such as Livejournal, Yahoo 360, Blog.com, Xanga, Weblogger, MSN Live Spaces, Radio Userland, Blogspot, Diaryland, the following are some less-well-known sites that are being used in schools:

- Anglefire (www.angelfire.lycos.com) has an easy-to-use editing tool, Lycos-Qumana, for inserting links, tags, and images into blogs.

- Think.com (www.think.com/en_gb) sponsored by The Oracle Education Foundation provides high levels of control over access in that only teachers and students from a particular school can access this site.

- Blogging platforms designed for schools. Given concerns about protection of student privacy and access related to potential lawsuits, as well as the need to reduce costs, districts have increasingly turned to platforms such as Moodle, Blogmeister, Gaggle, Learnerblogs, Edublogs, Kidzblog, or 21Publish: Classroom blogs.  For example, Edublogs (edublog.org) and learnerblogs (learnerblogs.org) designed by educators such as James Farmer that builds on a WordPress platform. Edublog has a lot of features that allow students to create blogs, for example automatic saving, spell-checking, and video insertion devices, as well as importing of material from other blogs. One safety feature that is appealing to teacher is its ability to block out spam.

- Platforms for elementary and middle-school students.  Elgg (elgg.net) or Industrious Kid’s Imbee.com are designed particularly for elementary and middle school students in that they provide a lot of security, interactive features, and secure storage space. (@ = Creating blogs).

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Individual versus classroom blogs.  In setting up blogs, you face the choice of having each student have their own individual blog as opposed to have students all contribute to one single classroom blog in which you register your students as “subscribers” or “contributors” to a classroom blog.  While you may be accustomed to keeping your own individual blog, and assume that students may also want their own blog, there are a number of reasons to use a classroom blog.  You can monitor all posts submitted to a blog so that only teacher-approved posts end up being published.  By having a classroom blog, students can then read and provide comments on each other’s writing, something that they would be less likely to do with individual blogs.

One example of a classroom blog from a middle school is the Room 613 Student Blogs (hetherington.learnerblogs.org/) developed by Mike Hetherington for his 6th grade social studies class at Horace W. Porter School, Columbia, CT for the 2005/2006 school year.

Insert Figure 6.1 about here

Hetherington created this classroom blog with Wordpress (learnerblogs.org) in which he is the site administrator, allowing him to approve any postings. To create student subscribers, he then went back to Learnerblogs.org and created a blog for each student with the first name or first name and last name initial as a user name and her own email address for each student. He then received passwords from Learnerblogs and in the “Add User to Community” box on the class blog entered in student user names and set the option as “subscriber” for each student entered. He then provided each student their user name and password on index cards, along with the URL for the Room 613 Student Blog as opposed to their own individual blogs (for further details, see: mhetherington.net/blogs/?p=8).

Each student’s name appears on the blog’s sidebar. Students then click on their names to add their own writing. Hetherington also has his students assume the role of “scribes” who summarize what their class is studying or learning on particular days.

One drawback to creating a single classroom blog is that as the administrator, he must then go the “manage” page to find student posts and determine if they can then be published or if they need editing, something that can be time-consuming. For his classroom blog for 2006/2007 (hetherington0607.learnerblogs.org), Hetherington employed Google Reader to capture feeds from his students’ posts that are then posted on the centralized Google Reader aggregator. He also suggests setting up categories in which students can store their posts, categories that could be student names, topics, subjects, or assignments. For example, in the blog above, this post at the end of the school year was created by a student, Sarah, which was filed into the category “6V, SarahH, Classroom Happenings.”

One advantage for using individual blogs is that students may experience a greater degree of ownership given the idea that they are writing their own blog that displays their own profile and links.  To insure that students are reading and commenting on individual blogs, you can assign “blog partners” who have RSS feeds to each other’s blogs.  You can also use RSS feeds to subscribe to each student’s blog.  You can then use tools such as Suprglu (suprglu.com/) or FeedShake (http://www.feedshake.com) to combine together feeds in one central site. If the entire class is working on separate blog reports related to a particular project, you can use Suprgu that employs a newspaper-type layout to create a final class report.

One disadvantage to individual blogs is that you will need to monitor each student’s blog to insure that their blogs are password protected and that they are not disclosing private information in their profiles or posts.

Another disadvantage of individual blogs is that students may encounter difficulties setting up their blogs, requiring a lot of assistance from you or technology support staff.  You should therefore select a blog platform that is relatively easy to set up, for example, Blogger.  To set up a Blogger blog, students go through the following steps:

1. Create an account. To have students create a blog using Blogger, you first have them go to blogger.com and have them set up an account. To create an account, they need to enter in a user name for signing into their account, a password, a display name that appears on their blog, and an email address (this address is not shared with third parties without students’ permission). It is important that in entering in the name to be used, that students not employ their last names or create a pseudonym so that they cannot be identified by online readers. You should also tell students that they should not use any last names on their posts or in comments.

2. Creating a blog name and address. Students then need to decide on both a name for their blog as well as words to insert in the blogspot URL for their blog: http://XXX.blogspot.com. They need to select a relatively unusual name because common names may have already been claimed. They need make sure that they use an easy-to-remember name for their URL’s because once their URL is set, they will not want to change it.

Students will then be given a choice of 12 different template options with different layout, font, and color options for their blog. They then choose a template by clicking on their preferred template; they can also preview different templates.

Once students select a template, Blogger then creates their blog. To activate their blog, they must then create their first post entry. To do so, they need to enter in a post title and a posting.  Students can personalize their blog by going into “Settings” and adding information about themselves; again, however, they should not use their last names. Students can also create a “blogroll”—a list of other blogs they are reading.

Creating Links Between Blog Posts

As previously noted, an essential feature of blogs is that they are highly connected through the use of RSS feeds, tags, “trackbacks,” and comments.  Creating these links helps students go beyond their own individual perspective to consider others’ perspectives on a topic or issue. Konrad Glogowski (2006) noted that as his students began writing about issues of genocide and human rights on their blogs, they were still writing about these topics from their own individual perspectives. However, when they began reading and responding to their peers’ posts, they began to perceive the value of links to others’ posts to foster their own thinking. Glogowski recounts this shift in their perspectives:

Then, one day at the end of April, it all changed. They started linking to each other’s work because they found other entries meaningful and relevant. No, I do not mean that they linked to entries that explored the same topics. No. They started linking to entries that helped them expand their own understanding of issues that they were struggling with. I began to see semantic relations.

Glogowski notes that as the students developed a shared interest in the topic of human rights, they “realized that the topics they had chosen brought them all closer together, through debate, through common research ideas, through links and correspondences that they created based on meaning, based on commonly shared research interests” (p. 3).

RSS feeds.  Students can subscribe to each others’ blogs using RSS feed aggregators such as Bloglines or Google Reader described in Chapter 2 (@ = Using feeds with blogs). When a student uses a feed aggregator to subscribe to a blog, they then receive notice each time new posts are added to that blog. Rather than reading separate blogs, students can go to their aggregator and peruse the different post titles to read those posts that interest them or that are relevant to topics or issues they are addressing in their posts.

    To have students create feeds, students can use their blogging site to create a feed URL—a URL that differs from their blog URL. For their Blogger sites, students can create a feed by clicking on Settings and then clicking on Site Feed. At that point, they need to determine whether they want provide only the first paragraphs of their posts by selecting “Short” or the entire posts by selecting “Full.”

Then, when students view their blog, they will now see “Feed (Atom)” added to their blog. When they click on the feed, if they have an account to Bloglines, Google Reader, or any other feed service, they will be asked to “Subscribe this feed to” and select those services on which they want to house their feed.

Students can then turn to other users whom they assume has expertise or interest in certain topics and access these other users’ feeds for their own use. For example, if a student recognizes that a blogger has extensive knowledge about and links to resources on scuba diving, then that student would want to access the kinds of feeds this expert blogger is drawing on. Because bloggers can now easily add a link to their Bloglines, Google Reader, or del.icio.us feeds as “my feeds” to their blogs, students can then go to that link and access these feeds. They can then add them to their own feeds, expanding their own feed lists. In assigning papers on a certain topics or issues, you can create a list of feeds related to these topics or issues for sharing with your students. Then, when students create their own feed lists, they can readily share those lists with other students.

Tagging blog posts. However, even when students have access to other feeds, they can be overwhelmed by long lists of posts. To further help them narrow down their search and review of posts, they can utilize tagging systems such as del.icio.us or Furl (www.furl.net) to described in Chapter 2 to find and subscribe to relevant blog (In Chapter 2, @ = tagging sites/Chapter 2). Students can also promote their own blog by tagging their posts with certain keywords so that their peers or other audiences can find their posts. In doing so, they need to employ relatively specific words, but not be too specific because these words need to reference a number of different posts.

Or, on some blogs, students may find lists of keywords addressed in posts or “tag clouds” or maps of the different tags for posts with the more frequently referenced tags in larger or bolder font than less referenced tags. Much as chapter titles in a book, these lists or “tag clouds” provide readers with some understanding of the topics dealt with in a blog. Users can then click on keywords to search for posts addressing certain topics.

Students can use social bookmarking tools to make their own feeds and tags public. For example, for students use Google Reader, when they find a post they wish to share with others, they can click on the “share” icon and that post is then becomes part of a public page available to others. If students are using Blogger, they can easily add their public Google Reader page icon to their blog. They need to open up Settings in Google Reader and find the “put a clip on your site” option. By clicking on the button, the Google Reader shared items are then placed on the EngaginginDigitalWriting blog

Using “trackbacks.”  Students can also create links between posts by use “trackbacks.” For example, on a blog, student A wants to create a link to student B’s post. To do so, A simply clicks on the “links to this post” or “permalink” after B’s particular post which creates a box with B’s URL. A then creates a post and sends that post to B’s blog, thereby creating an annotated link based on some perspective that A has of B’s post (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006b).

What also happens in this process is that when A makes a link to B’s post, a “trackback” or “links to this post” is created at the end of B’s posts. Other readers of B’s blog can then readily access back to A’s blog. The fact that a certain post is attracting a lot of links is registered by online blog tracking engines and aggregators such as Blogpulse, Technorati, Bloglines or Squeet based on certain keywords or tags so that then other readers will also find posts that are attracting a lot of readers and links (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006b).

As they scour other blogs, they may find texts that they would like to share with their peers, posts that address a topic of interest to them and their peers. When student A encounters these posts on B’s blogs they want to share with their peer C, they can click on the “link to this post,” add a comment about this post, and then post it to their own blog for their peers to read. If the peer C is interested, these audiences can then go to B’s original post to read that post. These trackback links are then recorded and stored according to keywords or tags on sites such as Blogdex or Technorati. Students can then search these sites for blog postings according to keywords or tags that interest them.

Comments.  Students also connect with each other by making and receiving comment on each other’s posts—the more comments they receive, the higher their level of engagement in blogging (Ellison & Wu, 2006). Knowing that they can anticipate some response to their post so that they then frame their position in a certain manner.

To foster student comments, you can employ “comment starters” (Davis, 2006) to help students specify their reactions, comments such as “This made me think about..., “I wonder why.... “Your writing made me form an opinion about... “This post is relevant because..., “Your writing made me think that we should..., “I wish I understood why..., “This is important because..., “Another thing to consider is...., “I can relate to this..., “This makes me think of..., “I discovered..., “I don't understand...., “I was reminded that...., or “I found myself wondering.......” Students also need to invite comments from their peers as well as react to comments as a means of encouraging further conversation by asking questions such as, “Do you agree?” (Garrett, 2006).

Learning to make effective comments as well as creating their own posts in response to others posts requires that students go beyond simply restating what their peers are saying to interpreting what their peers are doing in writing their posts—their purposes, agendas, and strategies. Joseph Harris (2006) argues that in reading others’ posts, students are “coming to terms” with others’ posts by posing the following questions about their peers’ aims, methods, and materials

Aims: What is a writer trying to achieve? What position does he or she want to

argue?

What issues of problems does he or she explore?

Methods: How does a writer relate examples to ideas? How does he or she connect one claim to the next, build a sense of continuity and flow?

Materials: Where does the writer go for examples and evidence? What texts are cited and discussed? What experiences or events are described? (p. 19).

Vlogs

Students can also create vlogs—blogs with video content (Bryant, 2006; Dedman & Paul, 2006; Verdi & Hodson, 2006). Students can post their video clips on YouTube, create a URL link, and then insert that link in their blog.  Rather then simply producing a blog post as a print text, students create a video to convey their message.  Their entire post could be just a video or then would use a video to supplement their written post . (@ = Vlog tools).

There are several reasons for the increased use of vlogs. In the age of YouTube, students are increasingly turning to video clips to insert in their digital writing. For example, in response to reading of the book, No Logo (Klein, 2002) about branding in advertising, James Trier (2007) asked his students to bring in an image, video clip, DVD, music CD, or website, particularly YouTube videos, that served to illuminate their interpretation of the text. For example, in response to Klein’s discussion of “cultural jamming” as parodying media production, students located videos that represented parodying and then, in adding these videos to a Blackboard course site, added descriptions of the video related to specific quotes from the book. For example, a student included a video of McDonald’s billboards on which the words “Double Cheeseburger” had been changed to “Double Bypass” (p. 411).

Audiences are now more accustomed to viewing videos on their iPod or cell-phone video players. To attract audiences to your message, given the option of a blog post with or without a video, many audiences will select the post with the video.

    Vlogs can also be used to provide audiences with visual demonstrations on how to do certain things. For example, Beach produced series of vlogs to demonstrate how to create vlogs for his college class blog: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/rbeach/umn. On this vlog, he shows students how to use a digital still camera to shoot video as well as how to edit their video and post it onto the class blog (for another tutorial on vlogging, see projectnml.org/exemplars/06vlog).  And, as previously noted, vlogs are particularly useful in media literacy classes.  Students can analyze video clips in their vlogs.  And, in shooting video, they are learning film techniques to apply to film analysis.

    Vlogs also provide an interactive means for sharing videos. Rather than simply creating videos to park on the Web, through use of RSS feeds to their vlogs, students are shared their videos to others in the class as well as larger audiences.

    Students can best learn about vlogs by viewing vlogs found on vlog directories such as Mefeedia, http://mefeedia.com, FireAnt, http://fireant.tv, iTunes http://www.apple.com/itunes or VlogDir http://www.vlogdir.com (@ = Vlog tools).  In viewing these vlogs, they could analyze their quality and rhetorical effectiveness in terms of how they engage audiences through use of video.

In using vlogs, students need to consider their purposes and audiences for use of video in what are relatively short productions of three to five minutes. Video lends itself particularly well to talking-head interviews—with a family member as part of an oral history project, an interview with people concerned about a certain issue as part of a journalism, or the student producer providing a visual walking tour of a certain place or site—images that themselves serve to dramatize people’s verbal perceptions in ways that are superior to simply quoting these people.

In creating their vlogs, students should create a script that highlights the different parts of their vlog, along with any voice-over narrative they will be using. They can then use their script to create a rough storyboard that sketches out the different shots and locations, as well the length of shots and use of any music or sound effects. If they are inserting video clips, they can go to sites such as YouTube.com, Voeh, BlipTV, metacafe.com that allow uses to share non-copyrighted video clips on this site.

Students need to know that because they are compressing down their video for online sharing, they do not necessarily need to employ an expensive, high-end digital camera for filming. In shooting their vlogs using a digital video or still camera, they need practice in shooting themselves as they are walking or shooting interviews by holding out the camera in a comfortable position.  They can also use webcams built into or attached to computers.

Once students shoot their video, they then import that video to their computers for editing with iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or any number of other editing tools (@ = Vlog tools). Students can also combine iMovie with iChat AV and iSight in which they conduct online videoconferences with people to then include in their productions. And the introduction of Web-based editing tools such as Jumpcut, Eyespot, Grouper, VideoEgg, and Motionbox means that students can do all of their editing on online sites (Kirsner, 2006) (@ = Vlog tools).

They then compress their video by exporting their video to Quicktime using iMovie or by creating .wmv files using Windows Media. They then use a blog platform to create a blog that will serve as their vlog. In using a blog, then then need to store their video on a video host such as The Internet Archive (archive.org), Ourmedia (ourmedia.org), Blip.tv. (blip.tv), dailymotion (www.dailymotion.com) or Uth TV (www.uthtv.com) to which will then be linked to their blog to create a vlog.

Educators Blogs

One of the primary challenges that teachers face is that they are often work in isolated contexts with little contact with others who teach similar subjects. You can address this isolation through using blogs for your own professional development. Because a lot of teachers have created their own blogs, you can access these blogs for teaching ideas by setting up RSS feeds to those blogs that are closest to your subject matter interests and grade level (the Website lists examples of these educator blogs). (For other educator blogs related to digital writing/literacies: @ = Educators’ blogs).

For example, Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed (www.weblogg-ed.com) and Stephen Downes’s (www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm) are popular blogs about use of Web 2.0 tools; middle school teachers share their experiences teaching middle school (www.middleweb.com/mw/aaDiaries.html); Susan Sedro (ssedro.blogspot.com) blogs about use of Web 2.0 tools in elementary school. Teachers at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, Colorado use their blog (thefischbowl.blogspot.com) to share reflections on blogging and learning. Teachers in Australia use the Digital Chalkie blog (www.digitalchalkie.com) to provide support and information to each other.

You can also use blogs to pose questions about your teaching to receive advice and information from others.  Teacher bloggers are grateful to receive comments to their posting that contain question and will generally respond to those questions. You can then create some online conversations with others about issues you face in the classroom. Miguel Guhlin (2006) describes his own process of creating such conversations:

I began simply with one or two education-related blogs such as “Bud the Teacher” (http://budtheteacher.typepad.com/) and “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” (http://www.speedofcreativity.org/) and then added blogs as I went. But adding blog feeds my RSS Aggregator is not what digital conversations are about. It's not enough to read, it's also important to write. To accomplish that, I started leaving comments relevant to the blog entries posted on others’ blogs. As I posted each comment, I included a link back to my own blog “Around the Corner” (http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/blog/)

    On my blog, I would expand on the conversation in a way that I only hinted at in the comment. In this way, I invited other bloggers to visit my blog and, in turn, leave comments on my site. And the nature of the comments left on my site has been very helpful, primarily because they give me information and advice that I wouldn't have had if I had depended on my “traditional” PLN, comprised of the people with whom I interact every day at work and in my personal life. Thus, in a way that Email lists could never accomplish—because not everyone can be subscribed to every Email list on which I work—blogs enable me to learn from strangers.

Guhlin can therefore continually receive feeds from a wide range of educator blogs who are then, in turn, linked to his blog. All of this serves to create the kinds of social networks that provide professional development support for educators such as yourself.

David Warlick (2006) notes that teachers can use their blogs to inform parents and district administrators about what students are learning in their classrooms, assignments, project descriptions, and examples of student achievement. At the same time, in sharing information about schools, you also need to be cautious in sharing any criticisms of a school, engaging in business or commercial activities, or disclose personal information about students, all of which suggests the need for schools to establish ground rules and professional development for both teachers and students.

Challenges in Using Blogs

There are a number of challenges associated with the use of blogs.

Devoting time for blogging. Blog posting on a regular basis can be time-consuming for students (Watrall & Ellison, 2006). Students also become frustrated when their blogs are not read; they may also have difficulty locate interesting content on postings (Watrall & Ellison, 2006). Based on this research, Watrall and Ellison (2006) are creating a Blogs for Learning site (blogsforlearning.msu.edu) that will serve as an online resource for helping students and teachers engage in effective academic blogging.

In reporting on problems in using blogs, Steven Krause (2004) noted wide variation in the extent to which his students posted messages as well as the quality of the posts. He found “very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive.” He realized that he could not assume that students will be engaged to “just write” in the blogs given the novelty of blogs. He attributed the low quality of the writing and lack to engagement to his not posting his own posts. Similarly, Darren Kuropatwa (2006), in tracking his use of his Pre-Cal 40S blog across different classes over a year, noted that he needed to provide more specific directions for student reflections, links, and his own posts. He also began to invite some of his colleagues to join in the discussion, which enhanced student interest. All of this suggests that blogging in the classroom entails a commitment on your part to be an active contributor to the students’ or classroom blog.

This suggests the need to devote classroom to blog writing and sharing comments during class, requiring a shift in your role in assuming center stage to focusing on students’ writing. As Barbara Ganley (2006) notes in describing her use of blogging:

Teaching with blogs the way I do—which means not applying them piecemeal but integrating them fully in all their messy, flexible, fluid promise—means you have to let go of control of the classroom, give up the stage and create opportunities for learning magic to occur. The trick is to weave the learning and the tool so seamlessly together that the blog is the class and the class finds the blog indispensable.

Rather than having students writing for you, you can then devote classroom to writing with your students. In writing with the students, you shift your status as the expert to one of learning from and with your students. While you may retain your role as a key audience, having a range of different audiences beyond you as teacher means that students are writing for audience to attempt to convince them to adopt certain beliefs and attitudes rather than simply writing to please you as teacher (For other ideas: @ = Using blogs in the classroom).

Safety and privacy. Another issue has to do with safety and privacy, as well as the use of offensive or inappropriate content on blogs. Given potential legal challenges related to these issues, administrators and parents who are rightfully concerned about these issues. Administrators may therefore adopt an overly cautious stance and not allow for use of blogs. And, given reports of child predators who frequent sites such as MySpace, administrators and parents are also concerned about the need to protect students from adults accessing their blogs.

Based on her research on MySpace, Danah Boyd (2006) notes that:

Statistically speaking, kids are more at risk at a church picnic or a boy scout outing than they are when they go on MySpace. Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services. The goal of a predator is to get a child to consent to sexual activities. Predators contact teens (online and offline) to start a conversation. Just as most teens know to say no to strange men who approach them on the street, most know to ignore strange men who approach them online.

All of this means that it is important to make sure that you set up procedures that do not allow unknown other people to contact your students. This would include having:

•    students only use first names and do not disclose personal information in personal profiles on their blogs, for example, their addresses, email, or phone numbers.

•    blogs that are pass-word protected, so that the only people who can comments are you and their peers in a class; one advantage to a classroom blog is that you have more control over access than when students have individual blogs

•    students be aware of issues of privacy and disclosure of personal information on the web, as well as issues of access to their blog.

•    students avoid language, personal attacks, and flaming that would cause harm to other students or compromise their privacy.

To encourage students to follow procedures, you could formulate in writing an “acceptable use policy” that students would sign indicating their agreement with following these producers. For use in his school, Bud Hunt (2006) has drafted an acceptable use policy:

    1. Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces. Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for your blog. While we encourage you to engage in debate and conversation with other bloggers, we also expect that you will conduct yourself in a manner reflective of a representative of this school.

    2. Students who violate the agreements here shall forfeit their right to school Internet access and will face other sanctions deemed appropriate by the administration.

    3. Student blogs are to be a forum for student expression. However, they are first and foremost a tool for learning, and as such will sometimes be constrained by the various requirements and rules of classroom teachers. Students are welcome to post on any school-appropriate subject (this one might be hard to define. With blogging having such a personal emphasis, I wonder how we balance school and personal lives) at any time, outside of their classroom requirements.

You also need to send letters home to parents informing them about how and why you are using blogs: your specific uses of blogs in your classroom, a rationale for using them in terms of teaching writing, the protections you have created related to privacy and access, and a request that they grant permission for their child to participate in using blogs in your classroom. Hunt sends home a letter to his students’ parents describing his use of blogs in his classes and requesting permission (see @ = Parent communication).

Because they are public spaces, students also may have difficulty knowing where to draw the line in terms of sharing private, confidential information or criticisms of peers, teachers, administrators, public officials, or parents. They need to realize that sharing private, confidential information or criticisms of others to an unknown public can have serious consequences, in some cases, even legal charges of libel. While the courts have recently protected journalists’ use of blogs to voice criticisms under the Free Speech amendment, students still need to be cautious about what they share when they do not know who will be reading their blog (@ = Blog safety).

Because students will also be including material and links from the Web on their blogs, administrators and parents are also concerned about students accessing and importing inappropriate or “adult” material on their blogs. Schools are also required by the Child Internet Protection Act to filter out such content, as well as formulate a policy regarding their students’ protection from such material. However, such filtering often does not block certain content, while blocking out other material that is beneficial. Students then not have access to material for legitimate academic purposes. If they are doing an assignment on certain topics related to sexuality, violence, terrorism, gambling, etc., they may find that access to sites on these topics have been blocked, leading them to use “circumventor" sites to skirt blocking or filters (Barrie-Anthony, 2006). All of this suggests the needs for schools to develop more proactive policies regarding online access to share with students and parents as opposed to punitive policies related to students’ Web access. Schools may be rightfully concerned about the costs of potential litigation if they have to address problems with blog use. However, in attempting to ban blog use, particularly if that use occurs outside of school property or a school assignment, they could face legal challenges related to free-speech rights.

Use of copyrighted materials. As we noted in our discussion of copyright in Chapter 5, students need to be aware of their use of copyrighted material or images on their blogs related to fair use in schools.  At the same time, in creating blogs, you and your students may want to give permission for others to use your material through the use of what is known as the Creative Commons tag/logo (Lessig, 2002). By adding this tag/logo to a blog, you or your students grant different degrees of permissions so that others can build on this blog material.

Students also need to be careful about sharing their own private information on their blog to which others have access because that information could be read by others such as future employers who might then judge the students accordingly. And, if this information revealed that the students had violated a school rule, then that information could be used against the student.

Summary

In this chapter, we discuss the use of blogs to foster student online academic writing, writing the draws on practices involved in public and personal uses of blogs, but that also focuses more on academic uses of blogs to foster learning. As did dialogue journal writing, writing with blogs provides students with opportunities for social interactivity with their peers and audiences from around the world through use of hyperlinks or RSS feeds to blogs. While the potential for writing to these audiences serves to motivate students to write, you also need to assume an active role as a participant in fostering use of blogs through your own contributions and prompts.