Some students are shy to share their work during peer editing or while public speaking in class. In Brian Tippy’s English classes, kids post their work on the Internet for the entire class to read.
“Instead of [an essay] being between me and a student, it’s between the student and the class,” Tippy said.
Tippy is one of several teachers in the Staples Social Studies and English departments who have begun to use blogging software, such as Blogger, to help foster a better learning environment. Tippy’s classes use the blogging software as a tool to share their written work.
“It creates a ton of material in the form of shorter posts for the teacher to read,” Tippy said. For Tippy, this tool is necessary for his students to improve as writers.
“If I have time to read everything my kids are writing, then they’re not writing enough,” Tippy said. “Students need to write a ton to become better writers. You have to write a ton and care about it.”
In addition to the improvement caused by the sheer wealth of material the blog forces kids to create, Tippy has noticed an improvement in his students’ writing due to the fact that the blogs are a more public forum than traditional essays.
“The most recent round of analytical papers was a good example,” Tippy said. “We do a lot of [analytical essays], but they’re generally written for your teacher. Now, kids are writing what they think rather than what they think the teacher wants to hear,” Tippy said.
English teacher Kristin Veenema, who also uses blogging software in her classes, agreed with Tippy.
“Having students each maintain a blog is a valuable and effective way to make their thinking more public, so it can be probed for further development,” Veenema said. “Writing their thoughts on a blog means that the rest of the class will see them and see them in their initial ‘messy’ stages. That is the valuable part, though; it helps to get rid of the misconception that successful thinkers create great ideas right from the start.”
According to Tippy, the word “blog” is somewhat of a misnomer for the technology he uses in the classroom.
“‘Blogging implies that the kids are journaling online, which is almost never what they’re doing,” Tippy said. “We’ve been using blog software, but we’re not really advocating ‘blogging.'”
Social Studies teacher Cathy Schager, who also uses blogging software, agreed with Tippy that her use of blogging software was not meant to give personal blogs to individual students.
“Kids already have their own websites [in my US Honors and Collab classes], so that would be redundant,” Schager said.
Schager, who started using Blogger “about three years ago” in her U.S. History Honors class, appreciates the “community aspect” of the blogging software and the “exchange of ideas it allows.”
“I found [the blogging software] to be a really nice way for kids to test out ideas,” said Schager, who frequently used blogs to facilitate online discussions. “It also allowed kids to cross-pollinate between classes. For instance, two kids from different classes were able to get into a discussion about race and perceptions of immigrants, which wouldn’t have happened without the blogs.”
For Schager, who utilizes other forms of learning technology in the classroom, the community aspect of the blogs is one of its advantages over other software.
“In my Middle East classes, kids keep Google Maps, but I wish they looked at each others’ [maps] and had to reply to them,” Schager said.
Students in Schager’s classes have responded positively to the use of blogs. Former student Emily Hanrahan ’11, who took US History Honors during the 2008-09 school year, felt it was a different, but effective, approach.
“It helped you grow personally and it helped you to be motivated,” Hanrahan said.
Schager has plans to expand her use of blogs in her Middle East classes this semester, hoping to post relevant articles on a blog and have students respond to them, rather than having students write individual current events reports.
