I have a class at the moment that is finishing a writing task that they must hand write as an end of year assessment task. We do this every year with our year 7 groups just so we can see how their writing as a whole has progressed through the year. I am amazed however, how many of the students struggle to communicate effectively in a written manner. Many have very sound spoken communication skills but really struggle in the written genre. How do we as educators have students communicating more effectively in the written genre?
I personally aim to have my students writing as often as possible. I guess we need to start thinking about how our use of technologies can help this. I think the answer may lay in how we start using blogging in our classroom. Students are being forced in a new and different way to express themselves through their writing and to share ideas and opinions with peers through writing. If I had the time I think I would start having students writing blogs on issues that interested them in general. Their daily lives at school, what they did on the weekend, hobbies etc. Furthermore, I think the commenting feature of blogging is something that teachers need to discover as a wonderful way to get students expressing themselves and their own opinions. I am trying very hard to stretch them just beyond commenting “I agree” etc. Any thoughts?
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Brett, I have no previous in-class experience to draw from but you make some good points I need to keep in mind when I get blogging underway in my class. It is a real discipline to create a worthwhile comment so maybe a start could be that all students are required to post an entry on their blog linking to and reflecting on a peer’s selected post of interest. Then get the original author to comment on the new post, with the goal to assess if the reader “got” the point of the original post! Does this make sense?
Brett,
I enjoy reading your students’ posts. It looks like you have taken the necessary first step in getting the students to organize their thoughts and opinions in written form. I hope that very shortly my 6th graders will be doing the same thing. I’ve recently been exploring the new learnerblogs.org site and have begun setting it up for student use.
One suggestion I have is to encourage some diversity of opinion from the students. From what I’ve read most of the students repeat the same opinion. I’d love to see one of the students step up and challange the majority while citing sources for their argument. They could do this using comments or new posts. I always welcome a good debate in the classroom, as long as both sides have some facts to back up thier opinions. To see this happen in a student blog would be interesting and educational for all parties. Good work. Hopefully my kids will be starting their blogs in the near future.
Mike Hetherington
Connecticut, USA
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